Sympathetic Magic
by ls269
Summary: This fanfic is a labour of love that I've been writing on DeviantArt for three years. It is long - 119 chapters and counting! -, romantic, and set during Severus and Lily's school years at Hogwarts.  N.B. It is very pro-Lily!
1. Chapter 1: All is Full of Love

Students were racing up and down Platform Nine and Three Quarters. Steam from the engine was hanging tenderly about their shoulders like a tattered shawl. Snape felt as separate from the scene as if he'd been made of smoke himself. He made his way up the platform with dragging footsteps, jostled and elbowed by the excitable students, his stomach weighed down with a feeling of leaden gloom - he was going back to the muggle world. He was used to loneliness, but loneliness in hostile surroundings was another thing entirely. He seemed to feel the air getting thinner, warmer, more stifling, the further he walked from the Hogwarts Express.

He felt as though he was a different species from the other students on the platform, as though he was caught up in a herd of stampeding buffalo and, for one bitter, weary moment, he longed to be one of them. It was a moment of weakness, he knew, because he usually cherished his separateness from these giggling imbeciles. He hated them as individuals, but he longed for what they amounted to.

The platform was littered with obstacles, half-hidden in the steam. There were cats mewling and arching their backs, owls screeching and ruffling their feathers, in cages that had been temporarily forgotten by their owners. There were curses as trunks were dropped on other people's feet, or students were shoved aside by older children who'd done all this before. The odd jinx flew above the heads of the assembled students, hit an innocent bystander, and caused eruptions of howling, tentacles and apologies.

Some younger students were so excited to be home that sparks flew involuntarily from their wand-tips. A few of them were hovering some feet above the ground, and had companions dangling from the hem of their robes, trying to pull them back down.

The platform smelled of smoke and sulphur from all the jinxes. The atmosphere was crackling with magic and expectation. The air was thick with it. But Severus couldn't share it, wasn't part of it - he was numb with a kind of sick, weary, familiar dread.

Boys raced along the platform - scuffling, shoving, tousling hair, tripping each other up (these were all recognised gestures of affection). One boy was garrotting another with his school tie (this was borderline, but he probably meant well). A knot of Ravenclaw girls watching this wore exaggerated expressions of exasperation - hands on hips, eyes rolling, theatrical sighs - and then smiled disarmingly if one of the scuffling boys happened to look over.

A first year Slytherin was leaning away from his mother disdainfully as she tried to pull him into a hug.

"Of course they fed me properly - honestly, mother, if you can't learn to control yourself, I'm getting straight back on that train."

The mother beamed, as if this was the cleverest thing she'd ever heard, and told him she'd missed him.

Snape felt sick. In later years, the unreasonable affection of mothers for their children was going to upset him even more.

Two Hufflepuff girls with red, round, tear-sodden faces were clinging to each other and sniffing wetly, gurgling their mutual affection. They told each other that they'd send an owl every day, that they couldn't wait to be back together, that they _hated_ going home. Snape knew that they'd forget about each other in a week. People were so fake, so melodramatic, so stupid.

That was when he felt a brief touch on his shoulder, and heard a low, lovely voice mutter "See you back home, cheerful."

It was Lily. She was smiling her arch, conspiratorial smile from under a curtain of dark red hair.

Snape felt his stomach lurch and, choked with surprised emotion, couldn't even manage a smile in return.

Lily was an affectionate friend, but she knew that open affection between them would provoke jeers, incredulous stares and even jinxes from passing Gryffindors or Slytherins. She didn't care, but she knew that Severus did, so, in the interests of a quiet life, (and compromising her principles for him yet again) she had taken to these subversive displays of friendship. Snape suspected that she was excited by the challenge: how to conceal her friendship, without curbing her affectionate impulses; how to please Severus, while still being herself. She was always walking that thin line, and not always succeeding - but her lively intelligence, and her loyalty to old friends, kept her trying.

She turned into the crowd and disappeared from view - engulfed in a group of giggling girls, and then hidden behind a bulky Slytherin.

The last glimpse of her that Severus caught was when she passed James Potter. He was at the centre of his little fan-club as usual, recounting a spectacular Quidditch move at the top of his voice, with wild hand gestures. His boasts grew still louder as Lily walked past.

Lily turned her back on him, stifling an exaggerated yawn. Her companion giggled.

Severus could not have loved her more. She made going home bearable. What was it to him if he was going back to a prison, while James Potter went home to a manor house? What did he care if his parents argued, and he had to breathe in the fumes of their mutual hatred for a few weeks? He had Lily all to himself for a while. That was worth anything.


	2. Chapter 2: The Best of Both Worlds

Back in Spinner's end, Snape was desolate. Lily wanted to spend time with her family and, in any case, he didn't want to seem too keen to see her, so he kept his distance from her house for the first few days of the holidays, spending as much time as he could out of the house or submerged in his books, visualizing the magic he wasn't allowed to perform, practising incantations and seething with resentment about Potter.

Spinner's end was not a place of action; it was a place to stew in resentment or longing. It was a kind of limbo world, where nothing ever happened, but nothing was ever forgotten.

His parents had asked him a few questions about his term, and then resumed their constant arguing with increased vigour, as though they needed to catch up. His mother looked withered and malnourished whenever she wasn't shouting. Performing magic and taunting Tobias Snape were the only things that made her look alive.

Eileen Snape's dark hair was fly-away and crackly; on the rare occasions that she performed magic, strands of it would stand out from her head in a kind of static halo. This spectacle was one of Snape's earliest memories of magic: he always remembered how happy she looked, in the grip of that static exhilaration. This was also one of the reasons he didn't wash his hair - because the same static effect occurred whenever he performed magic, unless his hair was particularly greasy.

Eileen's face was long, and taut with a general expectation of attack. She had long, sinuous limbs, but always walked around with her shoulders hunched and her arms crossed. This defensive posture, and her desire to be inconspicuous, Snape had inherited from her.

She was brilliantly sensitive, which made her suffering all the more acute. He saw the way she flinched when his father spat or cursed, and the way she shuddered when he raised his voice. The years could not desensitize her to him.

She hated him. She felt that he had made her betray her proud heritage, bring disgrace on her family. He had dragged her down into this hateful muggle slum, and then withdrawn into clouds of cigarette smoke and whisky fumes, leaving her alone. But hating him took up all her energy; she had very little to spare for Severus. She would sometimes snap out of her miserable trance for long enough to tell him that he needed new clothes - that his ancestors had set trends and created fashions in the Ministry of Magic, and that it was deplorable that one of their descendants should be reduced to this. These sporadic but tender outbursts would generally trail off into dark hints about his father's ineptitude. "If your father could hold down a proper job, it wouldn't be like this. But he doesn't understand what we are. He doesn't understand what's due to us."

Severus found this kind of talk pretty cryptic, because he didn't understand what was due to them, either. He would have settled for a lack of shouting.

Eileen Prince was a prisoner, but a complicit one. The door of her cell was wide open, but she had lost all knowledge of the outside world, and any desire to see the sky. All she cared about was revenging herself on her captors. So she stayed in her cell and waited for an opportunity.

Snape had seen that hatred could bind people indissolubly - his mother and father were soldered together, and painfully, clumsily, like some lame, limping animal, they had to make their way through the world hand in hand.

As a child, whenever it was possible, he would slip out of the house, and skulk around the streets, with their endless lines of red-brick houses, or watch the oozing flow of the nearby canal. His parents had never seemed to notice that he was gone, and he had relished the quietness, far away from their constant fights and the malicious rumble of the school playground.

They had no money, and all of Eileen's friends in the magical world had disowned her, so they'd sent Snape to the local primary school, confusing him with contradictory messages about how he was better than all the other children but he'd do best not to provoke them and to keep out of their way.

Don't draw attention to yourself, that was the only thing they agreed on. You're superior but you have to hide. No-one must know that you're different.

Well, what was the point in being superior if nobody was allowed to know it?

Snape developed a sneering resentment for the other school children - they made him jealous and disdainful at the same time. He didn't want to be like them - it was clear that they were stupid, loud, hostile, little animals. They teased him about his name and his mismatched, oversized clothes. But he hated them all the more because he wanted to belong to them, to anybody. Much as he wanted to be separate, distinctive, special, he also wanted to be like somebody. Because it was lonely, sneering at people all the time.

**‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

This school was also the first place he had ever seen Lily. To begin with, he knew her vaguely as a pretty girl who didn't tease him. And no matter how superior boys are taught to feel, they're always going to notice pretty girls who don't tease them.

Then, he saw her perform magic. She was in front of Snape in the dinner queue, chatting to her sister - a bony-faced blonde girl with a shrill voice who was whispering loudly about how the school bully's parents didn't live together.

"Layla says they're not even _married_. She says her mum told her that Dean Vernon's dad was in _prison_. Bet you that's where Dean'll end up."

Lily made a non-committal noise. She was staring out of the window at the horse-chestnut tree in the sunlit playground. Snape would grow to recognise these abstracted moods of hers, where she noticed beautiful things and suddenly forgot where she was.

No doubt her sister was used to them too, because she gave Lily a bony elbow to the ribs, making her start, and repeated: "His dad was in _prison_, Lily!"

Unfortunately, she had underestimated the force of her whisper. Dean Vernon was standing some way off, but he had heard his name, and the words 'married' and 'prison' and, dim as he was, Snape thought, he could conjecture the rest.

He pushed his way through the queue towards them - there were a few muted 'Ow's and 'Get off's, but never any loud enough for Dean to hear, because everybody knew that his dad had been in prison, and that he had taught Dean how to kill someone with a single punch.

"Whatchoo sayin' about me?" he rumbled. He could speak perfect English really; this accent was affected to make him seem tougher - a move that was patently unnecessary when you saw his bulging muscles and lack of neck.

Petunia gave a kind of whimpering gasp and said: "Nothing."

"Yeah, you was," Dean said, pushing her shoulder with such force that she almost spun completely around. "You was sayin' something about my dad."

"Get lost, Dean," Lily said, her hands on her hips (this posture was to become familiar to Snape too). "No-one cares about your stupid dad."

There was a silence. The hall held its collective breath. Lily Evans had called Dean Vernon's dad 'stupid'.

And then two things happened in quick succession. Dean raised his fists at Lily, and then suddenly Dean wasn't there.

From the startled grunts and swear-words that were suddenly issuing from the other end of the hall, they spotted him again, dangling from the basketball hoop, his stumpy legs flailing off the floor.

It was at this moment - as she looked up at Dean Vernon dangling from the basketball hoop, with an expression somewhere between surprise, exhilaration and satisfaction - that Snape first noticed her eyes. They were a startling, electric green, and they gave him goose-bumps.

**‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

On the third day of the holidays, Lily came to call for him, politely ignoring the way Eileen Snape's lip curled with contempt at the sight of her, and the way Tobias Snape leered at her hungrily. She had got used to these things - you had to put up with if you wanted to be friends with Severus.

It worried her sometimes. She wondered where it would end, what her feelings for him would make her do but, for the moment, she could bear his cruel, bigoted parents, if it meant she got to see him.

Snape, on the whole, was so happy to see her that he didn't notice his parents' reactions to her presence. He grabbed his keys, and the handful of muggle coins that he had managed to scrape together from around the house, and, doing his best to look casual, walked up the street with her without a backward glance at his front door.

It was late afternoon. The sunlight had become horizontal, and was shining on the red-brick houses, turning the windows on one side of the street into blazing sheets of light. Every house looked as though it were on fire. Severus didn't know why, but he found the sight soothing.

The shadows were lengthening, and the first chill of evening was infusing into the air. The terrace of houses stretched, like an unbroken chain, as far as the eye could see. Spinner's End seemed to have no end, which was just typical of the place.

The river still oozed languidly, its current slowed by crisp packets, bottles, cans and the semi-submerged bones of shopping trolleys, but somehow the air had never been clearer. Snape felt as though he was back in the Hogwarts grounds, breathing that icy mountain air, the kind so cold that you could feel it dispersing through your veins long after you'd breathed it in.

They went down to the canal-side and sat on the foot-bridge over the river, dangling their legs over the side - Lily's were not long enough to reach the surface of the water, but she was doing her best to get the toes of her shoes wet, stretching her legs out until she was teetering precariously on the side of the bridge.

They had been talking about the Dean Vernon incident, and Lily was trying to protest her innocence.

"I'm telling you, all I thought was: I want him to go away. That's it."

"You're lucky he didn't end up in Siberia," said Snape.

"But I didn't want him to get hurt," she protested.

"Oh, come on," Snape murmured in her ear, "not even a little bit?"

Lily smiled grudgingly. "Maybe I wanted him to look stupid," she admitted.

"You didn't need magic for that."

"I mean, he _did_ push my sister."

"Of course. He had it coming. When people get on the wrong side of you, they'd better watch out."

"I didn't say that," Lily interrupted coolly.

Snape smiled contentedly. He was always teasing her like this. She was so nice, that it was fun to make her out to be a shameless, mean-spirited bully. There wasn't a suspicion in his mind that it might get to her; he didn't understand that she didn't see herself as he did.

"Was that the first time you used magic?" he asked.

Lily shrugged. "For all I know."

She was stretching her legs towards the water. Snape was silent for a while, watching her dark red hair spill over her shoulders as she leaned forwards. It was jewel-bright in the sunshine, as red as the terraced houses in Spinner's End. Severus suddenly felt a kind of excited warmth spreading through his body. It was half greed and half tenderness; it made him resent and revere her.

"Do you think there's fish in there?" she asked, peering into the foamy river.

"Not living ones," Snape replied.

"I sort of always remember magic," Lily said musingly. "I never knew what it was, but I always had this feeling that, if I tried hard enough, I could make things happen. Like the world was just waiting for me to say the word."

Snape smiled his fond, exasperated smile again, but said nothing.

"When was the first time you ever used magic?" she asked

A shadow stole over his face. "Oh," he said, frowning. "It was when dad was hitting her - you know, my mum."

Lily turned her wide, green eyes on him, but he avoided her gaze, looking down at his shoes as they dragged in the murky water.

"I cast this charm," he went on, "I still don't even know what it was. It held him up in mid-air by his throat and sort of choked him. Nearly killed him. He hated magic even more after that."

"It wasn't your fault," she said gently, after a small silence. "You were just a kid."

Snape shrugged. "I knew what I was doing. I wanted to kill him."

"And quite right too!" she replied. "But you didn't; that's the important thing." She was silent for a moment, staring at her own shoes as they dangled above the water. "Why doesn't she leave him?"

"She can't. She hates him too much. If she left, there's the chance that he might find some peace. If she stays, she can torment him every minute until he dies. She doesn't know anything outside that. It's the only thing that makes her happy."

"I don't blame her," Lily said grimly.

"No, but then, you don't blame anyone, do you?"

She looked up at him. "Do you blame her?"

Severus considered. "No," he said eventually, "but she shouldn't have had me. If you're going to start a war, you should try not to drag civilians into it."

Lily sighed. "I know it's hard escaping," she said. "You feel like a traitor for getting out, because you think you should help her."

"There's no helping her," Snape said. "She's going to fight it out to the bitter end."

"Then you've got to get out," Lily told him frankly. Her eyes were so alive with sympathy that Snape suddenly wanted to make his troubles seem less acute, so that she wouldn't have to feel them so much. He was reminded of his mother's intense sensitivity, but somehow turned outwards. A little smile creased his face.

"I will," he said. "We both will. We don't belong in this place. We'll do something better."

Lily shrugged, and watched a dragonfly that had settled on a drooping leaf beside her; it was shimmering electric blue in the heat haze, and looked as though it had flown straight out of another world - a world of tropical ferns and mists and dinosaurs.

Snape knew Lily was easily distracted like this - beautiful things made her forget herself - but he suspected that her silence was due to something else.

"You do want to get out of here, don't you?" he prompted.

"Yes," she said slowly. "I just don't want to forget. It's hard to explain. I feel like you do; I don't belong here but I don't want to leave my family behind. I don't want to live without them."

"They'll never understand you!" he said impatiently.

"Maybe not," she said, with a mischievous smile, "but I won't compromise. I won't choose one world or the other. I want the best of both."

Snape sighed with exasperation, and gestured around at the uniform houses and the rubbish-filled river. "How could you miss any of this when you're at Hogwarts?"

"It's part of me." She leaned back on the palms of her hands and tilted her head to the sky, warming her face in the sun, closing her eyes in the brightness. "Anyway, this is good, isn't it? Right now? Our friendship? That's part of the muggle world. In the magical world, you don't want to know me."

Snape spluttered and turned red, but he could see that she was smiling playfully.

"That's not fair," he mumbled.

"It is kind of fair. You don't like Mary Macdonald, and she's muggle-born."

"That's because she's incredibly irritating," Snape said, half-smiling himself now. "She never stops giggling - and if I sounded like a banshee with the hiccoughs every time I laughed, I'd try to be serious as much as possible."

Lily managed to turn her smile into a disapproving frown. He decided, pretty as she looked when she was angry, not to press the subject.

"My point is," he said, "that I find plenty of pure-bloods irritating too."

"But how many muggle-borns do you find completely non-irritating?"

"Just you. Except when you make up words like 'non-irritating'."

Lily nudged him peevishly. "Are you saying that I don't annoy you?"

"Yeah."

"What, never?"

Snape shook his head.

"There's nothing I do that irritates you?"

"Well, this conversation's quite annoying," said Snape.

Lily laughed beautifully. "I knew it," she said.


	3. Chapter 3: The Vinculus Charm

The fifth-year started and so, too, did the arguments. It was mainly due to the heady combination of pressure, Potter and puberty.

"Do you like him?"

"No!"

"Why are you going to the ball with him, then?"

Lily unwillingly looked up from her book. They were sitting in the library, at a table next to a dusty, cob-webbed window that looked out over the lake. There were so many spiders skulking around the window-pane that the sunlight made spider-shaped patterns on their table. Lily had been running her fingers lovingly down the spine of one of her favourite library books.

"Because Dumbledore asked me to," she said simply.

"Why?"

She smiled shyly. "Because I'm a good student, and he thinks I'll make a good impression on Janus."

"What exactly does 'making a good impression' on him entail?"

Lily laughed. "Nothing untoward. I'm just supposed to be a model representative of the school, to-" she imitated McGonagall's crisp tones, "foster the growth of International Magical Co-operation."

"And this absolutely has to consist of you being bored to death by a surly half-troll, who won't stop reciting gob-stones statistics and can't even pronounce your name?"

She giggled again and Madam Pince, appearing suddenly from behind the nearest bookshelf, hushed her.

"Sorry. Sorry, Madam Pince," Lily whispered. She was usually on excellent terms with the Hogwarts librarian, since they both had an almost carnal affection for books. Lily seemed to have a lot of tenderness, but was too shy to bestow this on people, so she protected and cared-for her books. Snape was considering getting her a pet but knew that it would probably not be so informative. Unless he managed to get her a sphinx. And then she would probably never bother talking to anything else, because Lily was addicted to puzzles, and had been known to forego sleep until she had solved them. When the Ravenclaw portrait had asked her a riddle for a password, she had hurried away and returned an hour later, with a hastily-written essay, which she read out, while an interested crowd of Ravenclaws formed around her, all forgetting about getting into their common room in their haste to add substantive points or point out flaws in her argument. This could only happen with the Ravenclaws, who had rather taken to Lily after that. She had, however, completely failed to charm the Slytherins.

"Anyway," she said, when Madam Pince had withdrawn back into the shadows, "there's nobody else I want to go with that's going to ask me."

"Who do you want to go with that _isn't_ going to ask you?"

He had said this rather louder than he'd meant to. Madam Pince lost her temper. "That's it! Out! OUT!"

Hurriedly stuffing books into their schools bags, they left. The librarian's piercing, reproachful whispers, somehow bewitched to follow them, hastened their steps as they sped down the corridor.

"God, I wish she wouldn't do that!" Lily exclaimed, as soon as they had reached the Entrance Hall. "I was underlining something in _One Hundred Magical Herbs and Fungi_ in the Common Room last night, and suddenly I heard her voice hissing in my ear: 'Library books are not to be written in!' Made me spill ink all over my Dragon's Blood essay! I honestly think she's got the whole school under surveillance."

Snape, who was still thinking about Janus, and all the people that Lily might want to go to the ball with, didn't respond. They made their way down to the Entrance Hall. It was a bright day, and shafts of sunlight streamed through the high leaded windows in the corridors; the effect of all this brightness was to make Lily sparkle and Snape squirm.

"Will you come to the Magical Ethics Club tonight?" she asked, suddenly eager. "We're discussing whether use of the Unforgivable Curses is justifiable in fighting the Dark Arts."

Snape gave her an exasperated smile. Lily had started the Magical Ethics Club in spite of lukewarm enthusiasm from the two or three people she had managed to induct as members. No Slytherin had ever set foot in it, because ethics were inconvenient things to the ambitious. As Voldemort gained in strength, however, even Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws were beginning to come to the conclusion that ethics were all very well if you could persuade your enemies to abide by them, but if not, they made you distinctly vulnerable.

"Slughorn's coming," she added, as though she genuinely thought this was an incentive.

Snape sighed. "Thanks, but if I wanted to see Slughorn drooling all over you, I'd start paying attention in Potions."

There was a pause. When Lily replied, her voice was steely. "He likes me because he thinks I'm clever."

Snape gave her an appraising look, wondering how far he could push this topic. "Margot Holloway's clever, but he doesn't fawn over her like a devoted House Elf."

A playful smiled curled the sides of Lily's mouth for a moment. "You don't think I'm smarter than Margot Holloway?"

If Snape hadn't known Lily to be incapable of spite, malice or even long-term resentment, he would have said that she felt about Margot Holloway the way he himself felt about James Potter. The two girls fascinated each other, but were very competitive.

He shrugged. "Yes, in every way that matters. You're more creative than she is. It's just that creative people are inconsistent."

Lily gave him a look that comprised fondness, fury and amusement. "I love your diplomatic insults."

"That was a diplomatic compliment," he replied. They walked on in silence for a while, then Snape stopped suddenly and said. "I could get you out of it, if you like."

"Get me out of what?"

"Going to the ball with Janus. If he's boring you, I'll start a fight and we can slip away."

Lily shook her head in disbelief. "Were you listening to all that stuff about fostering the growth of International Magical Co-operation?"

"I won't fight Janus," Snape explained, as though this was obvious. "I'll start insulting you, and the fighting will just sort of spread around us."

"You might get hurt," she said.

Snape stared at her. Nobody, _nobody_, had ever voiced this concern before. He went on, talking rather fast: "There's this thing we can do with our wands. The Vinculus Charm. I read about it in _Agrippa's Almanacke_. If we cast spells at each other, any spells, at the same time, they'll collide in mid air and blind everyone around us with a flash of light."

"Temporarily?" Lily asked.

Snape shrugged. "Oh, yeah. I mean, they'll see spots in front of their eyes for a few days, but basically they'll be fine. We just won't do it in front of any teachers because they might know about the charm. I think it's old magic, though." He paused. She was listening excitedly, her bright green eyes trained on him. With difficulty, he remembered what he was saying, and went on: "The book said that Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff used it to halt a near-fatal wizard's duel between Gryffindor and Slytherin."

Lily was positively glowing with interest. "Show me," she said.

The _Almanacke_ turned out to be a battered green book with no words on the cover. Snape suspected it had been re-covered at one point in order to look more innocent, because the book inside was filled with illustrations of monstrous beasts and horrifically botched transfigurations. They read it in a dungeon classroom outside the Slytherin common-room, because Lily wasn't allowed inside.

She watched him flick through chapters with titles like: 'Cruel but effective', and 'Only to be used in sparsely populated areas', and the intriguing final chapter 'Absolute last-resorts'.

"Is this _dark_ magic?" she whispered. Again, interest had overcome her disapproval, and Snape smiled.

"In as much as it is intelligent magic, yes."

Lily raised her eyebrows, so he went on: "You don't know how often I ask teachers if something could be done, only to hear them answer: 'Yes, but it mustn't be done'. The only people who are testing the limits of what magic can do are the ones with a bit of moral flexibility."

"That isn't true!" she whispered heatedly. "Dark magic is the easiest magic there is! How moronic to kill something, or torture something, or blow something up! Think how much easier it is to destroy something than to fix it."

"Well, if that's true, then the best way to test the limits of what magic can do is to destroy something, so that it _can_ be fixed."

"I don't think we'll ever be short of wizards to destroy things, Severus," she said drily. "There's absolutely no need to add to their number."

She flicked through the pages, pausing to say thing like: 'Oooh, I haven't seen this before. 'Transfiguring curse scars and magical marks'…"

"That's so you can hide them, and pose as a normal person, if the Aurors are after you."

"But it would also be valuable for magical medicine, wouldn't it? Hiding disfiguring scars? I mean, it's the next best thing to actually healing wounds caused by Dark curses. I wonder if the principles of this spell could be adapted?"

Snape shrugged helplessly. There was an expression on his face that Lily's conversation often evoked: a sort of fond exasperation. He might have been listening to the ravings of a beloved child.

"Anyway, _this_ is the Vinculus charm." He opened the book to the chapter on 'Diversionary tactics'.

"This book really is written with the Dark witch or wizard in mind, isn't it?" she said wryly.

Heads together, they both read the description of the charm.

'The quasi-mythological status of the four Hogwarts founders is such that it is impossible to determine which, if any, of the stories told of them may have had a basis in fact. The story of Rowena Ravenclaw and Helga Hufflepuff's close friendship, however, is one of the oldest, and therefore might be deemed more reliable than some. With little in common to begin with – one being fiercely, vociferously intellectual and the other rather quiet and unassuming – the two women had little time for one another. However, both perceiving the dangerous hatred that had developed between Gryffindor and Slytherin, they decided that, for the protection of the school and its students, they should take steps to defend themselves against the terrifying and ill-moderated powers of their male colleagues.

Amongst other protective spells, they cast the Vinculus charm, a spell of great antiquity even then, in which two wands are bonded, so that, whatever spells they shoot towards each other, the result is always a blinding flash of light that disables anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity (the 'vicinity' being approximately a two mile radius). They used the charm to blind Godric Gryffindor and Salazar Slytherin when they duelled prior to Slytherin's final departure from the school. The story tells us that this duel had already decimated half the castle, and caused avalanches and forest fires in the surrounding mountains. Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff are generally credited with the subsequent rebuilding of the school.

The drawback of the Vinculus charm is that it is fuelled by trust, and will not work if the owners of the wands mistrust each other.'

**o:x:o:x:o:x:o:x:o:x:o:x:o:x:o:x:o:x:o**

The Summer Ball was unhelpfully right before the fifth-years took their Ordinary Wizarding Level exams and, as a result, most people seemed to regard it as their last chance to have fun, ever. Nervous excitement was rife. Brains that had been crammed full of astronomy statistics, the dates of goblin rebellions, and the twelve uses of dragon's blood, were now going to be saturated with alcohol, and many were under the distinct impression that, if they were sick, they would throw up ancient runes.

Snape waited in the entrance hall, trying - and succeeding, as he usually did - to be inconspicuous, because he was ashamed of his ragged dress robes and even a little ashamed of his date.

He was taking a fourth-year Slytherin girl to the ball: Sylvia Easterbrook. She wasn't anywhere near as glamorous as her name suggested. She had muddy blonde hair, a rather pointed nose and a high, spiteful voice a bit like Lily's sister's. Her favourite topic of conversation was her prestigious wizarding ancestry. She was preternaturally thin and, like Peeves, the sight of chaos and pain greatly excited her. He suspected that his reputation for dark magic was the only reason she had chosen to go to the ball with him (that, and the fact that fourth-years didn't get to go to the ball unless somebody from the fifth year or above asked them).

She was wearing grey silks, that looked so ancient they seemed positively organic. They didn't seem to move as fabric ought to. Snape wondered whether they had been bewitched to seem as though they were surrounded by a slight breeze. Their rustling sounded like whispering close-to. Around her neck, she wore a silver pendant shaped like a serpent, studded with emeralds.

He saw Sylvia looking coldly at his tattered dress robes when she arrived, but ignored this. He was searching the crowd for Lily, and hadn't really noticed anybody else. They weren't allowed to move into the Great Hall until Janus and his fellow Durmstrang delegates arrived, so he would be sure to see her.

After a few minutes she came down the marble staircase, sticking rather close to Mary Macdonald. She was breathing apprehensively. This wouldn't ordinarily have been noticeable but the low cut of her dress did kind of draw the eye.

She looked very pretty. She was wearing a white satin dress and, around her neck was a little ruby from the Gryffindor hourglass that counted House Points. Snape had given this to her after the hourglass got smashed open in a memorable duel between Avery and James Potter. It glittered darkly next to her pale skin, almost exactly matching the colour of her wine-red hair.

Snape saw, with a rush of hatred, that James Potter, too, was staring at her. When she passed him, he smiled at her, but Lily averted her gaze coldly and walked on. Catching Snape's eye, she smiled conspiratorially and raised her eyebrows at Potter's back, as if to say: 'What an idiot.'

Snape grinned at her.

Sylvia nudged him sullenly. "Mudblood scrubs up pretty nicely, don't you think?"

Snape shrugged.

"Still, it's pointless," Sylvia gave a contemptuous wave of her spindly arm. "She'll never get a pure-blood wizard to marry her."

Snape raised his eyebrows. "Is _that_ her plan?" he asked dryly, still looking at Lily. "I had no idea." He gave a thin smile and added, "Still, at least I'm safe from her machinations."

Sylvia evidently did not wish to discuss Snape's hybrid bloodline. She focussed instead upon his wizarding connections. "My uncle Orion says he was at school with your mother. Wasn't her name Eileen Prince?"

Snape shrugged again. He didn't like to think about his mother.

"She was the last of the Princes, I believe."

"She's not dead," Snape said irritably, but Sylvia didn't seem to have heard him.

"A great wizarding name…" She trailed off, dreamily. "I wonder you didn't take her name when you came to school. You, at least, have _some_ claim to it."

Snape surveyed her coldly. Sylvia, however, seemed oblivious to it.

"I have a very distant connection with the Princes. My great, great aunt Matilda married Moribund Prince in the nineteenth century…"

Snape had ceased to listen to her. Lily had been joined by Hector Janus, who was kissing her hand in what Snape considered to be an unnecessarily lingering fashion. He was pleased to see, however, that Lily was trying to snatch it back and, when he eventually released her, she wiped the back of her hand covertly on her dress.

"I have a connection with all the great wizarding families," Sylvia was saying, "the Lestranges, the Blacks, the Peverells - though, I don't generally advertise _that_ fact, they've become rather degenerate recently. Filled with blood-traitors like that Potter."

At this, she indicated James Potter, who was leading a pretty blonde into the hall. Snape dimly recognised her as a Gryffindor sixth-year called Malificent. She was peering nosily at all the couples and making snide remarks about their out-of-date dress-robes. Potter, it seemed, who could have taken any number of mildly attractive smart girls to the ball, had opted for the most attractive and most idiotic that he could possibly find. He was making ambivalent noises in response to Malificent's questions. His eyes were still on Lily.

The Great Hall seemed even bigger than usual, with its long tables missing. They had been replaced by myriad little circular tables surrounding a wide dance floor. The floating candles overhead were burning lots of different colours, and there seemed to be mirrors and reflective surfaces everywhere, giving the hall the look of a treasure-trove, sparkling with jewels. The stars in the enchanted ceiling were so bright that they looked like part of the decoration.

At the end of the hall, the raised platform where the staff table usually stood had been converted into a makeshift stage for a wizard's orchestra. These were different from muggle orchestras - and included such 'instruments' as warbling toads, harps that fired arrows into the crowd as they played and crystal flutes that glowed a different colour with each note. Snape privately thought that this was unnecessary. In fact, he strongly suspected that it was just showing-off.

Lily played clarinet, and had tried to join the orchestra in her first year. The music teacher, Professor Arcturius, had never seen or heard a clarinet before. When asked what it did, Lily replied, with the skill for lateral thinking that had served her so well during her first few years in the wizarding world: "It makes a nice sound." Professor Arcturius had replied that this wasn't enough, so Lily had persisted: "It can control the emotions of the audience."

"Indeed?" asked Professor Arcturius, brightening. "In what way?"

"Well, it can make people sad, or happy, depending on the notes I play."

A few people in the surrounding orchestra had sniggered. Professor Arcturius was staring dubiously at the clarinet. "But it's made of wood. Does it have a core of some magical substance, like unicorn hair?"

Lily, trapped in a web of half-truths, had felt the colour rise in her face. She'd stubbornly picked up her clarinet and played the saddest song that she could think of. She played well, and Professor Arcturius listened. One of his eyebrows, seemingly of its own accord, had risen almost to meet his hairline, while the other remained stationary.

When she had finished, he'd said. "My dear… that was lovely. Very… subtle. It's just that sounds in a wizard orchestra are… bigger. Nobody would be able to hear your Carry-Net. A wizard orchestra does not simply move its audience, it carries them away."

Lily had been very upset by this. Her mood had not been improved by Snape's well-meaning suggestion that the wizard orchestra had been invented by 'some flashy Gryffindor'.

Of course, magical instruments had been a big problem in the school when Severus and Lily had first arrived. There was an instrument called a Collapser, which emitted notes that had physical powers. There was a note that made your nose bleed, a note that made the audience hover a few inches in the air, even a note (much sought after by some of the older boys at the school, but never, to Snape's knowledge, found) that made everybody's clothes fall off.

Collapsers (and, in fact, the entire school orchestra) had been banned at Hogwarts after one memorable performance in which various audience members had been thrown painfully across the room and, in one case, through a window, though everyone was prepared to admit that the music that had accompanied the chaos had been very beautiful.

When Snape had told Lily about this, it had caused one of those rare and exciting moments when vindictive pleasure completely illuminated her features. Though Snape loved Lily the way she was, he had often considered that it would be worth trying to make her into a Death Eater, just to see this wonderful expression reappear with greater frequency.

The band started to play an eerie waltz, and Janus led Lily onto the dance floor. Her soft red hair reflected the jewel-bright candles dazzlingly. Snape noticed that she had let her hair fall over her right eye, as though she wanted to hide behind it. She often did this when she was nervous. And she probably knew that she had great cause to be nervous, because several of the Slytherins were muttering about this being a 'disgrace to the school'.

Leaving Sylvia hovering by the punch-bowl (she was already on her fourth glass, and Snape assumed that excessive-drinking was another glorious tradition of her wizarding ancestors), he walked around the outer circle of the crowd, staring at the waltzing couple in the centre. At one point, he almost walked into James Potter, who had also been stalking around the outer edge of the circle, looking at the dancers. They had exchanged looks of deepest hatred, and moved off in opposite directions. Malificent, Snape noticed, was also hovering by the punch-bowl, a couple of inches from Sylvia. As he approached, he distinctly heard her mutter: "That dress Evans is wearing is so last-season."

Sylvia, who liked things to be last-season and despised innovation of any kind, replied, "I think it looks very cheap and flashy. She probably bought it." A pronounced sneer came into Sylvia's voice: "I inherited mine. It's been in my family for generations. It was made for my great, great, great grandmother, Claudia Black."

Malificent evidently wished she hadn't initiated this conversation. She took the punch that Sylvia offered her and downed it in one.

"All the women in my family were very slim, as you can see," Sylvia went on boastfully and Snape, who was also having a glass of punch pressed into his hand, thought of a spell he'd seen in one of the books in the Restricted Section: 'Dark Diets: Bewitch those Extra Pounds onto the Hips of your Worst Enemy.' He wondered vaguely which girl had ended up with all the fat siphoned off from the women in Sylvia's family. A muggle-born witch, no doubt. He made a mental note to warn Lily about this the next time he saw her.

There were other dancers making their way onto the dance floor now, and Snape saw Janus lead Lily by the hand out of the throng. They settled at one of the tables around the dance floor. Snape saw, with some interest, that Lily had a polite but vacant smile frozen on her lips. He moved closer, hidden behind some burly Slytherin seventh-years, so that he could hear their conversation.

"My father vas Gob-Stones Champion at Durmstrang from 1954 to 1961. Every vone of his years at school, he beat all the competition. I grew up vith Gob-stones and iff I got sqvirted in the face, I vasn't allowed to vash for veeks and veeks, so that I learned from my mistakes."

Lily choked on her butterbeer, torn between horror and amusement. "That's terrible," she murmured, when she had recovered herself.

"It vas a very lonely childhood, as you can imagine. I used to pretend my Gob-Stones vere my friends…"

Lily looked as though she didn't quite know how to respond to this, so she gave him a brave smile and said nothing.

"But it vas all worth it, to bring honour and glory to my school, my country and my family. The very first Gob-Stones tournament that I took part in, I beat Karkaroff, who vas a seventh year, in an epic game that lasted two veeks."

Lily caught sight of Severus, and her eyes were pleading. Smiling, he pretended he hadn't seen her, and turned to pick up a butterbeer from the table behind them.

"It vas not until the seventy-fourth round that things really started to go my vay…"

"Snape!" Lily called desperately, and Severus turned to look at her.

"Yes, Evans?" he asked coolly.

Lily glared at him. "I expect you think that my dancing with the Durmstrang delegate is a disgrace to the school, or something?" she said meaningfully.

Severus hesitated, licked his lips, and then decided he couldn't tease her any more. His face assumed its accustomed sneer. "I do, as it happens, Evans. Your kind don't belong in this school." He thought of Sylvia and gained sudden inspiration. "You're corrupting decent wizarding families with your devious muggle ways."

She glared at him, probably a little harder that she would have done if he had saved her from Janus straight away. "How dare you? I have just as much right to be here as you do."

"No, you have half as much right, because you're entirely common, whereas I at least have one magical parent."

Janus stepped in at this moment. "She iss not common!" he protested. Turning to Lily, he said quietly. "I am thinking this should not be allowed."

"Vy… er… why don't you get a teacher?" she asked suddenly.

Janus did not move. He was glaring at Snape.

"I'll be fine," she added quickly.

Janus slouched off. Lily turned back to Snape, and a smile flitted briefly across her face. People were starting to look at them now. "You're just jealous because I always beat you - "

"Beat me?" Severus echoed derisively. "Ha! It's only because you're always smarming up to the teachers…"

Lily had pulled out her wand: "You take that back!"

"Lucky you ended up in a house full of blood-traitors and arrogant little creeps, you Gryffindor Scum!"

"Slytherin thug!" she shouted.

This was the signal to cast the Vinculus charm. Snape pulled at his wand and growled: "Stupefy!". At the same time, he heard her shout: 'Expelliarmus'. The spells met in mid-air, but what exactly happened after that, Snape didn't know, because he had shut his eyes. He could see the light through his eye-lids, though, and felt a warmth pass through him. It was like Lily's touch - it comforted and calmed and smelled of her shampoo. As the light flickered out, the warmth didn't leave him. It settled comfortably in his chest, like a cat that had curled up on top of his heart.

A curious little half-smile creased his face as he opened his eyes. She was staring at him, also grinning with exhilaration. Her annoyance at his hesitation seemed to have vanished. Everybody else was stumbling around, clutching their eyes.

Severus thought that they had better move before Lily's sympathy got the better of her, because she was biting her lip and looking around at the Great Hall with an expression of guilt and amazement. "I can't believe we just did that," she whispered.

Severus grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the doorway then, laughing, they ran through the rain, across the lawns to the greenhouses.

In Greenhouse Three, they sat side by side on the low wall that separated the plants from the work area. Snape conjured a fire in front of some Devil's Snare that had been snaking towards them, noticing with pleasure that she appreciated the wisdom of this action, and they warmed their hands beside it. The Devil's Snare withdrew back into the shadows and sulked beyond the flickering pool of fire-light.

Snape was feeling extremely contented. He could spend time with Lily, without any of the Slytherins teasing him for it (in fact, he was sure the Slytherins would praise him extravagantly for his attack in the Great Hall), he had sneaked two bottles of butterbeer (her favourite drink) away from the scene of devastation, and her wet dress was clinging to her body in ways that made him exceptionally glad that there was not much light in the greenhouse with which to be seen.

She, too, was smiling, though shivering, and she gave him a look of fond exasperation, as she said: "'Corrupting decent wizarding families with your devious muggle ways'"

"Yeah, my date thinks you're trying to get a pure-blood wizard to marry you."

"Well, I am," she replied sarcastically. "My goal is the whole-sale destruction of wizarding society, didn't you know that? I plan to give birth to a race of filthy half-bloods. I think I caught Potter's eye. Maybe I can start with him…"

Snape's smile vanished instantly. "That's not funny," he said.

Lily laughed. "That Malificent he's with" she said. "I've tutored her for Remedial Potions. If you want her to understand something, you have to think up Quidditch analogies. 'Now, Malificent, using a bezoar is like catching the Golden Snitch, and all the other antidote recipes are like scoring a goal with the Quaffle…'

Snape privately thought that you would have to be very thick for something Lily said to not get through to you.

They drank some more butterbeer, during which there was a lot more giggling at the phrase 'I vasn't allowed to vash for veeks and veeks'.

Recovering from her laughter, Lily said: "He was very sweet really. And he had a terrible childhood. I wonder if he's looking for me..."

Snape wanted to forestall any interference from Lily's conscience, so he quickly changed the subject. "I heard you got a careers talk from a St. Mungo's Healer."

Lily laughed again, almost choking on her butterbeer. With difficulty, she suppressed her smile and gazed at him solemnly. "You'll never believe who it was," she said.

"Who?"

"Bernadette Potter."

Snape raised his eyebrows. "What relation is she to our favourite Seeker?"

"Mother." Lily said, more solemnly still.

"You're _joking_."

Lily shook her head. She was smiling one of her wicked, conspiratorial smiles, (the kind that always made him feel she was sharing more with him than she ever would with anyone else) and her green eyes glittered in the firelight.

With difficulty, he forced his mind back onto the subject of Bernadette Potter. "I always imagined Potter's mum strutting around some old manor house in the country, sipping tea and ordering house-elves to torture themselves for chipping her tea-cups."

"I too was very surprised to discover that she had a calling besides spoiling her son," Lily agreed, grinning. "But she was really helpful. She's ever so clever."

Snape tilted his head to one side thoughtfully. "Well," he said, "she's obviously not that clever. She wasn't clever enough to take a contraceptive potion on the night her son was conceived, for example."

Lily laughed so hard that she spat out a bit of butterbeer.

When she had recovered, she glared at him in playful outrage. "You're like every other Slytherin, you know. Your methods are just different. You're still trying to kill me, only with laughter, instead of Dark Curses."

Snape nodded sagely. "I've only been posing as your friend these past five years in order to make you choke on your butterbeer."

Lily, who had been looking over his shoulder, suddenly smiled. She moved closer to him on the wall and whispered excitedly. "Hey, Sev! You want to get back at Potter? Kiss me."

"What?"

"He's watching us. He likes me, right? Kiss me."

And, without waiting for a response, Lily leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.

When she pulled away, Snape was unable to look at her. He felt hot and stupid, and stubbornly directed his gaze at a clump of lichen on the wall between them. Lily put her fingers underneath his chin and gently lifted his head to look at her. She was smiling, though rather nervously, and biting her lip.

"I think he's gone," she said, after a while.

Snape nodded stupidly. He couldn't think of anything to say. She was still touching the side of his face.

"Well, I guess I'd better go to bed," she murmured shyly. "Goodnight, Sev."

And, paralysed with joy, hope, desire, fear, and embarrassment, Snape watched her go.


	4. Chapter 4: The Hypocritic Oath

Snape and Lily were sitting beside the lake in the Hogwarts grounds, long before it became such an important land-mark on the map of Snape's bitter recollections, long before he started to think of it as the place where his life fell apart. Right now, he liked it. How could you refrain from liking a place where Lily was leaning on her elbows, staring down at her reflection in the water, and complaining about Potter? It was paradise.

"And he lost me all those points I won from Professor McGonagall for knowing about Switching Spells, and I'll never get them back, because I can't be as good as Potter can be _bad_," she said petulantly, her red hair trailing inches away from the surface of the water.

Severus sighed contentedly. The glare of the sun on the water was blinding, so he had turned away from it, and was leaning against the trunk of a beach tree on the bank. From here he could see the shadow cast by the castle, creeping over the lawn that lead down to the gates. It didn't touch Lily, though. Somehow, no shadows ever did.

"His mum's nice, though," Lily said, because she had an annoying habit of looking for the good in people.

Severus raised his eyebrows. "You mean in spite of her failure to take contraceptive potions when she ought to?"

Lily's pout spread into an involuntary smile, but she didn't say anything.

"She's just as bad as the rest of them," Snape went on. "She's taken the Hypocritic Oath."

"The what?"

Severus felt the unfamiliar thrill of knowing something she didn't, but he didn't betray it. "The Hypocritic Oath," he repeated. "Every Healer has to take it. You swear that you'll do everything in your power to preserve life, unless that life is muggle."

"I'm not taking it," she said fiercely.

"You have to. They won't let you work in a Hospital or Surgery if you don't."

"I'll go freelance."

"You'll go to Azkaban," he replied, in the tone of fond exasperation he reserved just for Lily. Most people exasperated him, but with Lily, incredulity was softened into wonder. He couldn't believe the things she believed – he couldn't share her recklessly optimistic view of the world – but it was still wonderful that it existed, especially in somebody who'd been told she didn't belong in the magical world ever since she'd arrived there.

"I know what I'll do!" she exclaimed, oblivious to his cynicism, as she usually was. "I'll set up one of those alternative medicine places in a muggle town. I'll pretend to heal them with crystals and whale-song, but I'll actually have my wand up my sleeve, and I'll be casting non-verbal healing spells – or even verbal ones, if I turn the whale-song up really loud. I can heal them magically without anybody knowing."

"The Ministry of Magic will know," Snape pointed out.

"But they can't object to it if the muggles are none the wiser," Lily insisted.

He gave her one of his exasperated smiles. "You never think about consequences," he said gently. "Say you do that – set up as one of those holistic idiots: eventually, word's going to get around. People are going to notice that you have a one hundred per cent success rate. They'll either start worshipping you as some kind of god, or they'll lock you up in a laboratory, and prod you with scalpels, trying to find out how you work."

"Maybe I'll be intentionally sloppy," Lily murmured. "Maybe I'll cure their Cystitis, but give them an ear-infection – that kind of thing."

Snape laughed. "You do that, and they'll stop coming to you. People always focus on the bad things."

"I guess that's a compliment, coming from you, so I won't try to defend them," Lily sais mischievously.

"We can't reveal ourselves to the muggles without either becoming their masters or their slaves. I know it's hard to believe, but the wizarding community has actually put some _thought_ into this."

Lily sighed petulantly. "Just because it could end in disaster, that's no reason to give up."

"It's the only reason to give up," said Snape.

Lily settled into silence, watching the tentacles of the giant squid unfurling under the surface of the water. But Snape knew her well: he could tell that it was not the kind of silence you get from gloomy acceptance, but from plotting how to rebel. He worried about her sometimes. He'd better get rich and powerful soon, to stop her from being thrown in Azkaban. The Dementors would have a feast if they ever stumbled across Lily.

Still, he loved her indignant innocence. It was beautiful, and in a way that went beyond glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes. It showed the beauty of her soul. Complacency was all you ever met with in the wizard world: nothing was important except Quidditch and chocolate frogs and showing off. It was no wonder Voldemort had crept up on them. It was wonderful to talk to somebody who wanted to question things, even if it wasn't in quite the same way as he did. Sometimes, he felt like they were the only two sane people in the world.

Half to distract her, and half to make her madder, he said.

"You know wizards have a cure for cancer?"

"No!" Lily exclaimed.

"It's true. It's just sitting there, in a spell book on some dusty shelf. Wizards don't get cancer, you see, so they've got no use for it. The inventor didn't even get an Order of Merlin, Third Class. In fact," Snape added dramatically, thrilling in the look of furious horror she was giving him, "he disappeared. Applied for a patent, and hasn't been seen since."

Lily was hanging on his every word. It didn't matter that her mouth was curled with disgust, and her cheeks flushed with anger. She was paying attention to him.

"Some people reckon the Ministry did away with him, to avoid a scandal," Snape went on, in a lower voice, so that she had to lean close to him. He smelled the ginger-bread scent of her hair, and felt excitement shudder through him, raising goose-bumps on every inch of his skin. "Because even a population as complacent as the witches and wizards of Britain would start muttering if they found out we had the cure to a disease that was killing millions of muggles a year, but we were keeping it to ourselves."

"So how did _you_ find out?"

"Avery's dad's Head of the National Potion Research Institute," said Snape. "He was the one who got handed the patent application. Showed it to a Ministry Official he was having lunch with, and the next thing you know, the inventor disappears."

"Avery's dad married his own _cousin_," Lily pointed out scornfully.

"True, but that doesn't mean he can't spot a scandal when he sees one. He's not as dim as Avery – marrying your own cousin isn't as bad as being a _product_ of the marriage between cousins."

Lily smiled, in spite of herself. "I still say there's no way the Ministry would have someone killed," she muttered.

"I agree," Snape said, shrugging. "They haven't got the guts. But they could throw him in Azkaban on some trumped-up charge. Especially now that everyone's so hysterical over You-Know-Who."

Lily tilted her head and gave him a far-away look. "Sev…" she whispered. "We could find him."

"What?"

"As a side-project." She nudged him affectionately. "You know, something to think about during those 'moronic lessons on Cheering Charms'?"

"You're joking, right?"

Severus crossed his fingers under his robes. If she really wanted him to do something stupid and dangerous, there were a limited number of ways to get out of it; he couldn't disappoint her: it went against every instinct in his body.

"What's his name, anyway, this inventor?" she asked, a little too casually.

"He's dangerous, Lil," Snape said flatly.

"I just want to know his _name_."

Severus sighed. "Something Murk," he said. "That's all I know."

They were silent for a while, Lily reaching into the water to tickle the squid's tentacles. She had quite an affinity for animals, especially magical ones. He supposed they could sense a sympathetic attitude. Come to think of it, most of the students at the school could sense a sympathetic attitude – especially the male ones – they all agreed that compassionate girls were much easier to get into bed than normal ones.

She was proving them wrong, though. Lily's sympathy only went so far.

"This world is so screwed-up," she muttered.

"The muggle world's not perfect, either," said Snape, who knew from bitter experience. "Neither world is ideal, but at least in the magical one we get to be ourselves."

"_I_ don't."

Snape gave her a crooked smile. "You?" he asked incredulously. "You'll be yourself wherever you go. I pity the poor idiot who tries to stop you."

"I just want to feel like they _care_ about muggles!" she exclaimed.

"Maybe they will, in another twenty years or so."

"It depends who's in charge, doesn't it?" Lily asked gloomily. "If Dumbledore stays in control, they might. But _him_ …" she trailed off.

Severus knew he had to be cautious on this topic. She'd be angry with him if she knew his intention of joining Voldemort; but at the same time, he wanted to come to her rescue; he wanted to feel indispensible to her; he wanted her to fall into his arms and weep with gratitude, so he said. "I won't let him get your family, you know. You can trust me."

Lily managed a weak little smile. "That's what I've been telling Meg and Mary. But they don't think I should."

Snape was happy that she hadn't reacted scornfully or suspiciously, and happy too that she was sticking up for him around her moronic Gryffindor friends. But, still, he didn't like the idea that they were abusing him to Lily behind his back.

"Well, they're idiots."

"Sev!"

Severus relented. He hadn't seen her for days; he didn't want her to start sulking with him now.

"It's only because you're hanging out with people who think Dark Magic is _funny_," Lily muttered reproachfully.

"And you're hanging out with people who think Potter is funny. But I still like you."

Lily rolled her eyes. Really, to suppose that James Potter had the monopoly on charm, was to ignore Severus Snape at moments like these.

"The point is, you're not your friends," he went on. "So I hang out with a couple of vicious idiots? It doesn't change _me_. They could never do any real damage, anyway – they're too thick."

"But _you_ could do real damage," she replied.

Snape was deeply flattered. He tried to suppress the smile, though, because she was watching him with a surly frown.

"But I won't. Not to you."

"And that's supposed to make me feel better, is it?" she asked, sitting up and folding her arms in exasperation.

Severus felt a pressing need to change the subject, so he said something that had been on his mind all through this conversation: something he never would have said if her beauty, and the fact that she stood up for him, and the fact that she believed he could be dangerous, hadn't gone to his head.

"You know what I like about you?" he said. "I could never have made you up."

Lily, caught off guard by this comment, laughed. "I'm not sure whether to be flattered or offended by that."

Severus suddenly regretted that he had said it. It was a difficult idea to explain, without straying into uncomfortable territory. "I just mean…" he muttered, picking up a handful of grass and twisting it, "I mean, I've got a pretty good imagination. I've had to – I didn't have toys or TV or a top-of-the-range broomstick like that Potter creep. But I couldn't have invented you. I don't have the materials, not for you. Everyone else, I could have dreamt up at the age of four: vicious bullies, biased teachers, giggling idiots," Severus felt more comfortable now that he was insulting people, and his voice became stronger. "I mean, spoiled little princesses like Narcissa Black, or sadistic maniacs like Bellatrix are not exactly difficult to predict. All you have to do is work out what they want, and you know what they'll do. But you… you do the opposite, most of the time."

Lily nudged him playfully. "You mean I'm a masochistic maniac?" she asked.

She was trying to make him feel less uncomfortable, and Severus felt both grateful and humiliated for it. He hated her being kind to him. It made him feel like a charity case.

Still, he smiled. "Yeah," he said. "A kind of Anti-Bellatrix."

"Now _that_, I can take as a compliment," Lily said cheerfully. "And maybe, when we collide, we'll both be annihilated, like matter and anti-matter. I'd like to go in a heroic cause like that."

Severus didn't know why, but he found this sentence chilling. Still, he had exposed himself to enough of her sympathetic understanding today: he didn't want to make things worse. So he went back to his contemplation of Hogwarts' lengthening shadow, and kept his worries to himself. He was used to it.


	5. Chapter 5: The Last Night

In the library, darkness had turned the windows into black mirrors. It was one of those exhilarating nights where the atmosphere outside was at once forbidding and inviting. The darkness beyond the window was impenetrable; it seemed thicker than on any other night, and the wind howled plaintively through the unseen branches in the forbidden forest, adding the creaking of trees and whipping of leaves to the wild, but invisible, cacophony.

Everything inside the library was warm and quiet, though the studying students were thrillingly reminded of the cold by the creeping chill that oozed from between the window-panes.

Severus and Lily were sitting at their favourite table by the window. This would be their last night together for a long time, although neither of them knew it. Tomorrow, their friendship would shudder to a halt down by the lake with the words 'filthy little mudblood'. And, when they found each other again, their relationship would bear little resemblance to the term 'friendship'.

But tonight, they were studying quietly. The noise of the gale outside was generating an air of nervous excitement, and they kept stealing glances at each other over the top of their books, and smiling, though neither of them knew precisely what it was they were smiling about. They were together, indoors, and the night outside was horrible. That was enough.

Neither of them had made any mention of the kiss in Greenhouse Three. In fact, nobody who knew Snape would have noticed any difference in his behaviour, except that he was grinning a lot for no apparent reason, and was suddenly behaving with perfect civility to Janus, who had sought him out at the Slytherin table in the Great Hall the day before:

"I vas told your mother's name vas Eileen Prince."

"Yeah?" Snape had replied cautiously.

"She came to Durmstrang to play Gobstones in my father's time. He said she vas vonderful. Such poise and concentration!"

Snape had tried to imagine his mother with poise and concentration. These days, she was so absorbed in her own misery that she forgot to brush her hair, or iron her clothes. Last time Snape had seen her she had put lipstick on her bottom lip but not the top one. Her magic, when she was permitted by her husband to attempt it (that is, when her husband was out, or asleep), was clumsy and feeble. Eileen Prince lived wrapped up in the worst moments of her life, and was only really haunting the present.

"Oh," he'd said. "Great."

"You vere still very unkind to Lily," Janus had muttered, but without much conviction, as though this was merely a ceremonial comment that he had to get out of the way before they could talk about Gobstones again.

Snape gave a dismissive wave of his spoon. "Have you seen much of her lately?"

"No. She is avoiding me, I think. She must like somevone else."

Snape had shivered with delight, and listened to the talk about Gobstones without a trace of his usual impatience.

Remembering this conversation with Janus, Snape glanced up from his book at Lily. The crashes and creaks of what was unmistakeably a tree being blown over in the forest made her shiver slightly and she looked up, too.

"I hope Hagrid's alright in this weather," she said, glancing pointlessly out of the window.

Snape looked back down at his book, and said, with the barest trace of a sneer, that it would take more than a gale to blow Hagrid over.

Lily recognised that it was in deference to her feelings that he had kept his sneer to a minimum, and she smiled slightly. It was hard for him to be nice, but he was trying. Putting down her book for good, she leaned back in her chair and stretched her legs out.

"I don't think my brain can absorb any more tonight," she said, yawning.

Snape put his book down too. Lily had closed her eyes and was sitting back in her chair contentedly. Everything was dark beyond their pool of candlelight, as though somebody had set out to paint the scene on a black background, but given up half-way through. The stands behind her extended only a little way, before they dropped off into darkness. Lily's pale, radiant skin and darkly glowing hair seemed to be the only colour left in the world; they were both so intense that they reminded Snape of stained glass, with the sun streaming through it.

As he watched her, all the sharp, resentful lines on his face softened; his habitual frown disappeared; he looked suddenly very young and eager; his eyes seemed to deepen – they no longer resembled hard black stones but bottomless pits. He was strangely transfigured. Nothing about his appearance had changed, but everything was different. Lily did not notice this, however; he dropped his gaze to his book as soon as she opened her eyes, and then his face became sharp, opaque and resentful once more.

"I've been thinking," Lily began in a low voice, because Madam Pince was looking murderous, "of asking Margot Holloway to Magical Ethics this week. Maybe I can reason her out of her political apathy."

"You just can't resist a lost cause, can you?" Snape murmured.

"One of the reasons I'm friends with you," she replied cheerfully, helping herself to one of the chocolate frogs that were piled beside his books.

Snape treated her to one of his strange, exasperated smiles. These expressions were a kind of compromise whenever happiness was trying to intrude upon his thoughts, but he couldn't quite give way to it. He was too frightened of being humiliated to let go of his calm, sneering, indifferent manner, even around Lily, but neither could he ignore the pleasure he felt in her presence, so this odd little half-grimace, half-smile was the result.

Once or twice, pure love had overcome his fear of rejection, even his resentment, and he had drawn her into his arms, his contentment too perfect for words. On such occasions, he pitied the Marauders, or even forgot who they were, and let his beautiful Lily fill his whole world. He would be on the verge of telling her how he felt about her, but always some vague fear would intrude – fear of her laughter or, worse, her pity, fear that they couldn't be friends anymore – and instead he would press his face into her red hair, willing her to read his mind, because he couldn't tell her what was in it.

Lily understood more of his feelings than he generally gave her credit for. She knew that he wanted to be close to her but was too frightened of being rejected or betrayed; she knew that he admired her, and thought her clever; they had developed a way of expressing affection through teasing and playful arguments that managed to circumvent all his fears about being close to people; but she couldn't guess that he loved her. He confused her: sometimes he was so distant with her that he seemed positively disdainful. If she tried to sympathise with him about the way the Marauders treated him, he would snap at her, or tell her it was none of her business. The only exception he made to this was when she offered to insult James Potter, and Lily didn't really feel that Snape's resentful obsession with James Potter should be encouraged.

Besides which, five years of taunting and prejudice had diminished her self-esteem more than anyone would have guessed from her confident manner. She couldn't imagine anybody loving her, least of all Severus, who was so wretched and proud and aggressive and solitary.

Despite her better judgement, however, she liked him; she cherished the teasing insults he lavished upon her, she found the arguments exciting (except when he veered into terrain so morally repugnant to her that she felt slightly sick), she allowed herself to hope that he could learn to be a better person, and even flattered herself that the hope was selfless, just a generous expression of confidence in an old friend. Occasionally, she would tell herself not to lose her head; she couldn't trust him, after all; he was too angry, too cruel. But while these worrying aspects of his personality were only directed towards others, she always found some way to overlook them.

She was later to become very angry with herself for that.

Lily looked at her chocolate frog card and gave an involuntary exclamation of delight that caused Madam Pince to swoop down on them with a deranged fervour in her eyes.

"Quiet!" she hissed, spit flying onto their table.

Lily gave an apologetic little smile, which entirely failed to charm the librarian, and lowered her eyes demurely to her book, trying to look as sorry as possible. This only lasted a few seconds, however, because the moment Madam Pince had stalked away, breathing very hard through her nostrils, Lily turned to Severus and whispered.

"I've got Circe! She's the only one I was missing!"

Snape raised his eyebrows. "And is that any reason to behave like a squealing Hufflepuff?"

She ignored him, too consumed with elation to join in the friendly exchange of insults.

Snape continued to look at her while she greedily read over Circe's various achievements – she was, apparently, a pioneer in the fields of Potions and Transfiguration. When Lily looked back up at him, there was a fathomless expression in his black eyes. She would have called it tenderness, except that it was a bit too fierce. Whatever it was, it made her blush.

"The first magical feminist," Lily said proudly, after a while. "A very clever witch who turned men into beasts." She sighed theatrically and then muttered: "If only it was legal to follow her example!"

"Of course, you realise that, as it was _my_ chocolate frog, the card actually belongs to me?"

Snape couldn't suppress a smile at the appalled, wide-eyed look she now directed at him.

"You wouldn't…" she began, but then checked herself. Lily was always quick to understand how other people felt, though hopelessly ignorant of her own feelings.

It wasn't precisely that he didn't want to be kind to her – he was always helping her with spells and potions, and warning her about attacks that his Slytherin friends were planning – it was just that it had to be exasperated kindness, or condescending kindness; otherwise, it made him vulnerable. Lily realised that she could get her chocolate frog card and make him happy at the same time, and all she had to do was compromise her principles a little.

The realisation that she was always compromising her principles for Severus Snape pressed on her slightly, but she brushed it away, impatient to make him smile.

"I'll tell you what I'll do," she said, in a shrewd, business-like voice. "You give me this, and I will assist you in any non-fatal tricks you might be planning to play on James Potter."

She was not disappointed. Snape grinned at her. The slight uneasiness she had felt didn't leave her, however. Although she hated Potter and didn't see anything wrong with defending her friends from his casual cruelty (besides which, she fully considered him too arrogant to be capable of suffering, in any meaningful way), she didn't like to encourage Snape's enmity, or get involved in it herself.

"I'll have to approve them first," she added quickly.

Snape shook his head, still grinning at her. "You wouldn't approve anything. I know you. You'll end up feeling sorry for him."

Lily looked highly affronted. "If there's anyone in the world I couldn't feel sorry for, it's him! After what he did to you in Charms last week - ."

Snape's smile faded instantly. A dull flush suffused his sallow cheeks and he said, a little aggressively, "I don't need your pity."

"I'll remember that," she said, trying to smile. Not for the first time, she wondered whether she was just trying to convince herself that he was her friend. She blushed, miserably confused, and muttered something about getting an early night before the exam tomorrow.

Snape didn't say anything. He watched her until she was swallowed up by the darkness outside the reach of the candlelight, and then shuddered wretchedly. It was only when the sound of her footsteps had died away that he realised she had left the chocolate frog card behind her. For a few moments, he considered going after her, apologising, forcing her to take the card, but then his thoughts strayed to the Charms lesson she had alluded to and, lost in bitter recollections, he let her go. He would find her tomorrow, and make everything all right.


	6. Chapter 6: Vengeance

And then it happened. He didn't remember much about it, to begin with. The whole incident was just a swirling, white-hot patch of pain that he couldn't bring himself to investigate further, in case, by some hellish miracle, it started to hurt even more.

But it wasn't in the nature of a Slytherin to hide away from the facts for long.

The taste of soap lingered in his mouth for the rest of the summer, and he wondered – when he was rational enough to wonder – whether this was purely psychological, or whether Potter put something in his jinxes to ensure their longevity. It would be just like the bastard.

He spent the holidays wandering around the streets and broken-down factories that bordered Spinner's End. He was angry with everyone except Lily – and it was hard to rationalize why he wasn't angry with Lily, but rationality, at that moment, was not his strongest desire. Vengeance was his strongest desire.

But he was trapped in a muggle hovel with paper-thin walls – and, even if the walls hadn't been paper-thin, his parents' arguments would have been perfectly audible. They would have been audible from the _moon_. So he took his lust for vengeance onto the streets, and was vaguely surprised when his furious footsteps failed to melt the tarmac on the pavements.

Mostly, he spent his time in an abandoned warehouse a little way back from the river, where it was cool and shady in the simmering summer heat, thumbing through the beloved pages of _Moste Potente Potions_ and imagining which poisons he would feed to James Potter and Sirius Black if he had the chance.

He had to stay away from his own house because his parents were arguing worse than ever – his presence seemed to trigger it – and his father had been quick to notice the absence of Lily. He'd asked Severus in the first week of the holidays why his 'little red-head friend' didn't call round anymore.

"I liked her," he'd muttered darkly. "She was good for keeping you out from under our feet."

Well, if that was what they wanted, Snape was only too happy to oblige.

In the third week, he gave in and walked up to the park that stood opposite Lily's house. It was deserted, because the weather was too hot even for the sun-starved English. He sat on one of the swings and balanced _Moste Potente Potions_ on his lap, looking at a poison that turned the victim inside-out, and fervently imagining the spectacle that would ensue in the Great Hall if he slipped this into James Potter's pumpkin juice.

After about half an hour, the door of her house opened, and after ten apprehensive seconds in which he tried to arrange his face into a casual expression, he looked up.

Snape gave a deep, shuddering sigh. Petunia Evans was making her way towards him from the house. She made a great show of doing this reluctantly, in case anybody who saw them happened to think they were friends.

"What are you doing here?"

"What does it look like?" said Snape coldly, not looking up from his book.

"She doesn't want you here."

There was a high-pitched, nasal quality to Petunia Evans' voice that grated on Snape's nerves.

"This is a public park," he said matter-of-factly. "I'm allowed to sit here."

Petunia leaned against the side of the swing. Horrible as she was, she was not quick-witted. It took her a while to think up her taunts. They were usually, however, right on target, and today was no exception.

"You really upset her, you know. She cried when she told me what you did. In front of the whole _school_. I'm glad you don't have any friends now."

Snape stared straight ahead. There was a pounding in his ears. Think of Hogwarts, he thought. Think what would happen if you got expelled and ended up having to live in this world, with people like _her_.

"Now she's got a new freak friend," Petunia went on, with casual contempt.

Snape looked up, and saw her mouth twist cruelly. She knew she was on to something here.

"She's out with him today. He's still a weirdo, but at least he's got proper clothes," her eyes lingered on Snape's grey hooded jumper, several sizes too big, and his tattered jeans, at least two inches too short. Then, slowly, as though relishing every word, she said: "It's that Potter you're always going on about."

This, he hadn't been expecting. No restraining thoughts of Hogwarts occurred to him in the split second it took him to draw out his wand and point it at her.

"You're a liar," he shouted. He was on his feet, and trembling with rage. "You're a _liar_!"

Petunia backed against a tree. Her face was white. "You're not allowed to do magic outside of school!" she protested.

"We are for liars!" Snape improvised wildly. "We're allowed to turn liars into slugs. In fact, we're _supposed_ to turn liars into slugs. I'd get detention if I _didn't_ turn you into a slug!"

"All right, _all right_!" she wailed. "He's called Roger Davies or something, not James Potter!" Recovering herself a little, as Snape lowered his wand, she added: "He's still better than you. _He_ washes his hair…"

And with a glance to left and right, making sure that anybody who saw her noticed her contemptuous expression, she stormed back into the house.

Snape's vision blurred with anger. His insides gave a furious lurch, as though he had taken the potion that turned the drinker inside out. For a moment he stood, gripping the chain of the swing hard, forgetting where he was, and even who; forgetting everything except his hatred.

But Snape's tragedy was that, even in moments of extreme emotion, he still retained a glimmer of rationality. There was an icy core at the centre of his brain, that all the combined heat of his deep-seated love and obsessive hatred couldn't melt. There, it was always winter, but never Christmas. Exactly the same caution that prevented him from telling Lily how he felt about her, or punching the Slytherins who insulted her, or ever truly enjoying himself (except when he was making other people suffer), kept him from cursing Petunia Evans.

Slowly, he mastered himself, breathing deeply through his nose. He prised his hand off the swing's chain, noting dispassionately that its pattern was deeply imprinted in his palm.

He knew enough of Lily's frankness to believe that she was not at home; if she had been, she would have come out to tell him to leave by now.

He also knew that Roger Davies had a crush on Lily. He was a Ravenclaw prefect in their year, and the only pure-blood wizard in Lily's Magical Ethics Club. Most people assumed he had simply joined up in order to impress Lily, and it was certainly true that she hadn't stopped talking about his impassioned speech on Muggle Rights for weeks after he'd made it. But he had a reputation for being highly-principled in any case. It was widely known that he had persuaded his family to pay their House Elf wages. Apparently, the Galleons paid to the House Elf had by now formed a teetering pile in the kitchen, which the Elf shuddered to look at. Davies would occasionally glare reproachfully at his mother whenever she tried to dust this money off and use it for shopping.

This was just the kind of pointless morality that Lily admired, so it was plausible (and the thought sent a cold shudder through him, despite the summer heat) that she would go out with him.

He moved off the swing and sat with his back to a tree that screened him from Lily's house (because Petunia was squinting spitefully at him from the kitchen window). He would just wait for her to come home, that was all, and force her to believe he was sorry.

**‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

Lily had not spoken to Severus for three weeks now and, to celebrate this sad anniversary, she buried her ledger, in which they had written their riddles and conversations, at the bottom of her school trunk, underneath a horrible flowery pink blouse that Petunia had given her last Christmas. (Petunia's resentment had no other outlet than the buying of horrible clothes for her sister, which Lily was always too kind to refuse to wear. Snape had teased her mercilessly when she'd worn the blouse, though he had actually found her quite attractive in it).

She hadn't spoken to anyone about her lost friend. Such a large portion of her life, her secrets, her affection, had been tied up in her friendship with Severus, that nobody could really understand her once it was gone.

She felt like a jigsaw puzzle with a crucial piece missing, so that nobody could tell what the picture was. How could she tell Meg Valance, or even Mary Macdonald, about her worries? How could she share puzzles and riddles with them? How could she crystallize her own sense of right by arguing with them? They had exactly the same ideas of right as she did.

Now she had to forget the portion of herself that she had poured into the friendship with Severus. There was no recovering it; it had been mangled by abused trust and wilful stupidity. If she took it back, it would poison her: make her bitter and cruel, like he was. Forgetting was the only option, as far as she could see. For a few minutes, she felt sick with longing for her old self, and it glimmered before her eyes - her own dear, trusting soul. She was sad and bitterly angry at the same time.

But she pushed it aside. It was time to put away childish things.

That was why she was meeting Roger Davies. It was the one thing everyone agreed on about Roger Davies; he was a grown-up. He didn't have dark ambitions or Death-Eater friends. He had responsibilities and a social conscience. He was all the bare ingredients of an ideal man, but something must have happened in the assembly process, because what all these bare ingredients amounted to was an earnest, humourless Quidditch captain, who was keen on campaigning and questionnaires.

He made her feel half-dead. But, since her mind was a rage of pain and misgivings whenever she permitted herself to feel alive, maybe that wasn't such a bad thing.

She was going to meet him in the little wooded scrub-land by the canal. He knew Manchester, that was another plus-point about him. He worked in a muggle soup-kitchen there every other weekend.

She stepped under the trees, and felt her shoulders sag with relief. It was very dark in here, even at the edge of the wood; a nest of tangled roots and peeling bark that shut out the sound of the wind and smelled of damp earth. She felt so exposed outside; it would be wonderful to be invisible and enclosed.

It was a Sunday - and it made her think of church - the silence being stirred by plaintive organ music, like dust motes in a breeze, the sun coming out suddenly from behind a cloud, and throwing stained-glass glimmers into the assembled congregation. There had been something so sad about the whole thing - or was it just the fact that nostalgia was intrinsically sad?

No, it _was_ sad. A place of pleading and remembering. But there had been hope too. Not the kind of electric hope that courses through the crowd at a football match, but a serene hope linked inexplicably in Lily's mind to the sun coming out suddenly and illuminating the stained glass windows. A wonderful sense of certainty and security prevailed, and whether or not it was groundless didn't seem to matter. That had been Lily's experience of church. The morals and the stories she could not now remember, but she remembered the atmosphere - sad and hopeful at the same time.

And she longed to feel again the serene conviction, the untroubled certainty of those mornings. You were doing what was right just by turning up; you were distinguishing yourself by doing what you were told. You didn't have to think for yourself, or decide whether or not you could trust people.

The breeze blew at her back, raising goose-bumps along every inch of her skin – the first goose-bumps she had felt since she'd broken up with Severus. Roger Davies had Apparated behind her, at a respectful distance, and was now respectfully clearing his throat. He didn't try to sneak up behind her, startle her, and then accuse her of behaving like a 'squealing Hufflepuff' when she screamed.

And that was a _good_ thing, of course. It was _progress_. She just wished progress didn't have to hurt so much.

**‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

The Revelio Potion allowed people's true characters to show momentarily on their faces. It had been invented, the book informed him, by a mad recluse in the twelfth century, who was convinced that the inhabitants of the nearby village, who sometimes came to offer him food, were demons. He invented the Potion to restore them to their true state and, after several disastrous attempts, in which the potion simply killed the poor people whom he had persuaded to drink it, the monk found himself looking at a horrifying assortment of creatures. The villagers' faces became animalistic, in strange and differing ways. Some people acquired long fangs, others furry muzzles, hooves, scales or snouts. They took on the appearance of the animals that symbolised their vices. Unfortunately, the villager with fangs tore his throat out.

Snape looked up from the page. The suburban dusk was quiet. Birds twittered around him. Every now and then, a car would rumble past, wending its way home.

At half past nine, he stopped reading his book (partly because there was not enough light, and partly because he couldn't concentrate for all the horrible images that started to occur to him, of what Lily might be doing with Roger Davies). But he didn't have to wait long. It was a quarter to ten when she came around the corner, looking like a ghost in the pale twilight.

Snape got up, but remained hidden behind the tree. She wasn't alone. Davies was walking with her. From his hiding place, Snape could hear the monotone rumble of his voice, though he couldn't distinguish any words except 'unethical' and 'reprehensible'.

"I know," Lily was saying mechanically. "I know."

There was an odd, jerky quality to her movements, as though somebody else was pulling her sinews and twitching her nerves, animating her from within like an ill-fitting glove-puppet.

They came to a halt outside the front door, but Lily – out of automated nerves – kept on talking about magical ethics.

"I mean, the improvements that wizards could make to the quality of life in the muggle world are - ,"

Very suddenly, as though he had to do it before he lost his nerve, Davies kissed her.

Snape gave a low moan. For a few seconds, he clung wretchedly to the hope that she would slap Davies, but she didn't. She suffered the kiss. She didn't return it, or smile, or squeeze his hand – she just accepted it with a kind of solemn, trembling blankness that was somehow worse than any passion would have been.

The errant curtain of hair fell across her eyes again, and she made no move to push it back. For Severus, it seemed like the final curtain on everything. That's it, it said. The show's over. You can hang on to your ticket stub – for all the good it'll do you – but please clear the theatre, because we have to get ready for the next show – starring Roger Davies as 'The Second Quidditch-playing Moron to Ruin your Life'.

"Well, I'd better go in," she said, with the same solemnity. "Goodnight, Roger."

With the last lingering remnants of his self-control, Snape watched the door close behind her, watched Davies (who was grinning as though he'd been Confunded) disappear down the street. Then, for a while, he knew no more. For maybe half an hour, the ice cube of rationality at the centre of his brain dissolved, along with the rest of his world.

When his fury had subsided, he found himself on his knees on the dirty floor of the warehouse he'd been sheltering in for most of the summer, with a plan fully formed in his mind. Every inch of him was trembling, his knuckles were bleeding, but he knew exactly what he had to do, and this calmed him down. Slowly, he gathered up the torn pages of _Moste Potente Potions_, being careful to collect them all. The page bearing Lily's birthday greetings, and her love, had been torn into pieces, and it took him a long time in the gathering gloom to locate every piece, but eventually, he was satisfied. He would have to repair it the muggle way, since he wasn't allowed to use magic in the holidays. The blood from his knuckles had stained his grey sweatshirt, but he doubted his parents would notice. They were so astonishingly preoccupied with hating each other, he sometimes wondered that they ever found time to eat and sleep.

He walked through the streets, contemplating his plan. The rusty glare of the streetlamps made his vision harsh and grainy, but his head was amazingly clear. He stopped outside the doorway to the house in Spinner's End, listening to the shouts proceeding from within. Then, taking a deep breath, as though about to plunge into icy water, he opened the front door.

Three hours later, he was lying on his front on his bedroom floor, with _Moste Potente Potions_ propped up in front of him. He had used spellotape to fix the pages back in place. The page with Lily's message on it was now reconstituted; it had been like completing a jigsaw puzzle, and it had soothed him. Despite the cuts and bruises, he had found that his hands were remarkably steady as he worked. It was good to finally have something to _do_. And now he had something to think about too: a purely intellectual something that could distract him whenever he was tempted to think about Lily kissing Roger Davies, or the scene by the lake: revenge.

He flicked back a few pages to the title-page where Lily had written: 'Dear Sev, Happy Birthday! Lots of love, L.' and, his eyes slightly unfocused with hatred, thought about what he was going to do.

The Department of Magical Games and Sports was trying to revive the Triwizard Tournament. Janus had been sent over by Durmstrang as a sort of scout, to investigate the possibility of holding it at Hogwarts, since neither of the other schools were prepared to be absolutely open about their locations, especially in the climate of fear that Voldemort's rise to power was generating. Severus knew that the Heads of Durmstrang and Beauxbatons would be coming to watch the opening Quidditch game of the term in October.

James Potter would want to do something very spectacular. And if the idea to do something daring and reckless hadn't already entered his thick head, it could be planted there. He was utterly predictable.

And Severus knew just what kind of stunt James Potter could be tempted with. The best of it was that he, Severus, wouldn't have to get his hands dirty at all. He could just sit back and watch Potter humiliate himself.

When the stunt failed and resulted, if not in deaths, then at least in severe injuries, then Hogwarts, Gryffindor and, in particular, James Potter, would be disgraced. The Heads of Durmstrang and Beauxbatons would boycott the Triwizard Tournament, and the idea would have to be abandoned. (Snape considered this prospect with some regret, because he had been thinking of trying out for school champion himself, as - he knew - had Lily, but the likelihood was that it would go to Sirius Black or James Potter - Dumbledore was so biased towards them).

**‹****×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

Ulysses Santacruz had been a very famous Argentinian Seeker. He had, however, been bored, and, as Snape's father was so fond of saying 'the devil makes work for idle hands'.

Not that Ulysses' hands would have been considered idle by anyone else's standards; it was just that he was so good at catching Snitches, even on his primitive, nineteenth-century broomstick, that they genuinely appeared to zoom straight into his waiting arms. Ulysses hardly even had to stretch. His team-mates, too, though phenomenally successful, were getting fat and cynical because they never got the opportunity to play; as soon as they mounted their brooms, Ulysses had caught the Snitch and the game was over. Some of them decided that it wasn't even worth turning up. It was not unusual to find Ulysses marching out to meet the opposing team alone, his broomstick slung jauntily over his shoulder, his little black eyes twinkling like the night sky. As he shook hands with the Captain of the opposing team, a pitying smile could be seen to play around the corners of his mouth. This generally unnerved his opponents so much that they were still on the ground, staring in bewilderment at each other, by the time Ulysses had zoomed down again, the Snitch cradled tenderly in his hands.

Ability had been a curse for Ulysses Santacruz. Therefore, he decided that he would make a Snitch of his own. One that would test him to his very limits, and Ulysses Santacruz's limits were unlimited.

The Dark Snitch was many years in the making. Ulysses could be seen making notes for its design whilst on his broomstick, half-heartedly stretching out his arm for the Snitch. It was simply not enough to enchant the Dark Snitch to be exceptionally fast. As fast as they were, Ulysses always seemed to know where they were going. He therefore began plans for a Snitch that was cunning, a Snitch that could defend itself, a Snitch that would be a worthy adversary. And, in case that was not enough, (because Ulysses had noticed that Snitches tended to give up, and become very docile, as soon as they thought they were about to be caught) he enchanted the Snitch to open when he was close to it, and release a paralysing potion that would immobilize him, thereby enabling the Snitch to zoom away again.

After five years of careful planning and testing, during which Ulysses occasionally turned up to work with magical burns or temporarily paralysed limbs (but was nevertheless still able to catch the Snitch), he finished the Dark Snitch in time for the Quidditch World Cup Final of 1849: England vs. Argentina. He substituted his new invention for the regular Snitch that had been intended for that game.

Records of precisely what ensued were scarce owing to the fact that the players could never be induced to speak of it, even under Veritaserum, and the spectators were somehow transported to Paris, with no memory of who they were, and no idea why they were speaking Spanish, as opposed to French. When their memories were painstakingly reconstructed by Ministry of Magic employees, it became clear that the Dark Snitch had consumed the referee in some sort of green fire and somehow knocked every player other than Ulysses out of the air. Ulysses himself had vanished. He was last seen, many decades later, by a muggle goatherd on a mountaintop in Peru. According to the goatherd, (whose memory was subsequently modified) Ulysses had a long white beard and was zooming after 'some kind of flying black marble' on a broomstick.

As the Snitch was never caught, that particular Quidditch match was technically still going on, though the last player (aside from Ulysses) to have played in it died in 1964.

Snape knew all this because, painful as it had recently become, he was very fond of Quidditch, rather as Lily was fond of Andromeda Black - they were both unable to meet the standards of their obsession, their obsession was exceedingly cruel to them, but they were awed by it nevertheless.

He also knew, however - as only a wizard interested in the Dark Arts would - that Ulysses Santacruz had drunk unicorn blood in his feeble old age, in order to survive longer, to catch his precious snitch. Snape had read about this in _Agrippa's Almanacke_, under the chapter entitled 'Absolute Last-resorts'. In the feeble half-life that had ensued for Ulysses, he pursued the Snitch to the mountains and glens of Scotland, and then - because his supply of Unicorn's blood had run out - he travelled to the Forbidden Forest in the Hogwarts grounds, seeking a fresh kill before he resumed his search.

Severus knew the rest because he had so often sat detention in Dumbledore's office and been left alone there while the Headmaster went to fetch them cocoa. Snape had found the portraits of the previous Headmasters and mistresses of Hogwarts to be very informative, when they weren't cursing and muttering about his obscure blood-line.

Phineas Nigellus Black had told him the story of how the Centaurs in the forest battled Ulysses Santacruz. Even in his aged and feeble state, Ulysses had snatched the arrows out of the air with consummate skill. Finally, however, there were just too many of them. When his body hit the floor, he was clutching twenty arrows in each hand, but his body was stuck with hundreds more, like a pincushion. The Dark Snitch, settling mournfully on the body of its defeated master, was shut up by them in a box made of dragon-hide (which is impervious to fire), and presented to the Headmaster of Hogwarts, during a brief period of highly co-operative civility between centaurs and humans, for safe-keeping.

Unfortunately, they had presented it to the wrong Headmaster. Phineas Nigellus Black hated Quidditch, granted, but he was fascinated by powerful objects, and under the distinct impression that his family should possess all of them.

It was hidden in the Black family vault – a cellar underneath the Hogwarts dungeons – to which at least two easily-blackmailable people had the key: Narcissa and Bellatrix Black. Severus made a mental note to start with Narcissa. She was a lot easier on the ears than her cackling sister.

A simpler revenge would do for Black, Lupin and Pettigrew, thought Snape; something from his book of Potions, perhaps. As he flicked through its pages, an expression remarkably like tenderness settled over his pale face. He thought of Lily and her immoderate affection for books; he remembered her lovingly running her fingers down the spine of her favourite library books, but he had to stop, and turn his thoughts back to his revenge, because it occurred to him that even now she could be running her fingers lovingly down the spine of Roger Davies.


	7. Chapter 7: Meg and Guillotine

Lily spent a week of the summer holidays at Meg Valance's manor house, riding Hippogriffs, feeding the herd of Thestrals on large, dripping, greying chunks of meat (a terrifying experience, since she couldn't see the creatures that were snatching the meat out of her hands), being stared at by haughty old Valances in the portrait gallery, and being very apologetic to the butler whenever he fetched her something.

They didn't have a House Elf, because of a long-standing family fear of 'inferior magical creatures'. But, apparently – and to Lily's relief – muggles were not included in this category, because they tolerated Silversmith, the muggle butler, with a kind of upper-class indifference that almost amounted to politeness.

He was a difficult man to be polite to, in any case. He never spoke, if it could possibly be avoided, and he looked bulky and out-of-place, standing in the corner of the room with his shaved head, too-tight robes and constant smile. There was something slightly... _indecent_... about that smile, especially when his pale, milky-blue eyes were turned on Lily. Fortunately, Meg's family seemed to be immune to social awkwardness, and were therefore serenely unaffected by his presence.

Meg herself was green-eyed, square-jawed and sporty. She had dark blonde hair, always pulled back into a serviceable ponytail, and possessed boundless energy and a very loud voice. She seemed to bounce everywhere, as though she had got on the wrong end of a Springing Charm when she was younger.

She was the only child of a very old wizarding family. As her father (after marrying seven times and even experimenting with dangerous Fertility Charms) had abandoned hope of producing a male heir, he devoted his time to instilling the manly virtues of chivalry and courage in his daughter. He could bear the loss of the name, but not the character, of his family. The Valances had been great warriors, distinguished Generals in the quashing of several goblin rebellions (as such, it had become a proverbial expression amongst the goblins that, while you could never trust a wizard, you deserved to have your tongue nailed to a dragon's back-side if you trusted a Valance).

The Valances had been in Gryffindor from time immemorial, (there were even rumours that Meg's great-uncle Haricot had had his daughter killed because the Sorting Hat had placed her in Ravenclaw). In fact, if Meg Valance had been the sort of girl to worry, she would have been quite anxious as she approached the stool with the Sorting Hat on it in her first year. Fortunately, she was not, and therefore bounded up to it, as she bounded up to everything in life (she never, ever bounded away).

She was merry, confident and utterly devoid of sentimentality. She had a tendency to talk over people, not because she wasn't interested in what they were saying, but because she had been raised to command, and not to listen. Her father had told her that people would try to tell her what to do from time to time, but that their advice was not to be heeded because they were not Valances.

"What if they are?" she had responded.

"They won't be. You and I are the only ones left. And once I have taught you to listen to the promptings of your noble blood, you may disregard any command I give you which conflicts with it."

Meg, being quick on the uptake and not at all afraid to speak her mind, had spotted the flaw in this argument.

"What if my noble blood is telling me that I've learned to listen to it before you've decided I have?"

Maximus Valance's noble blood had obviously prompted him to ignore this, and he had proceeded to tell her that her great, great grandfather had ridden into battle on a Hippogriff, therefore she would be learning to ride one. She had been six at the time. She still had the scars.

The advantageous thing about her upbringing was that she had not been taught to regard muggles or muggle-borns as inferior creatures, because her father had been careful to point out that every creature was equally inferior to a Valance.

‹**×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

On the third day of Lily's holiday at the Valance House, Meg dragged her down to a vaulted cellar with the mysterious declaration: "There's something you have to see, if you're ever going to understand the Valances."

Meg led her past wine-racks, wine-presses and barrels of ancient brandy, explaining that some relative or another had died at sea and been pickled in one of the barrels, but they had never found out which one.

"Dad says he'll have dissolved by now," Meg explained. "So they're probably safe to drink. In fact, dad's been threatening to make me drink them for years, 'cause he reckons I'll absorb Captain Valance's battle spirit if I drink his corpse."

Lily made a face, and hoped she wasn't revealing her cultural ignorance of the wizard world. "I think you should refuse to do that."

"Don't worry, he only talks about it if I get a mark below an 'O' in Defence Against the Dark Arts, and - ," she grinned, "needless to say, that doesn't happen very much."

They wandered on in silence for a while, until Meg piped up with: "D'you think Sirius is handsome?"

You had to get used to abrupt subject-changes, when you were talking to Meg Valance.

Lily took her time thinking over the response. She had to be careful here, because she was talking to Sirius Black's on-again, off-again girlfriend. And, technically, he _was_ handsome, it was just hard to find somebody handsome when they were laughing at dejected outsiders and hexing first-years...

"Yeah, I guess so." She shrugged. "Everyone _says_ he's handsome."

Meg seemed to come to herself. She grinned with all her old exuberance and said. "Yeah, he's a charmer alright. But that's not enough for you, is it? You need someone more… cerebral."

Lily laughed at the word. "Exactly. Couldn't have put it better myself. _Cerebral_."

"Mary says you don't confide in people very much," Meg went on, looking at her, as though for the first time.

Lily smiled playfully. "What is it you and Mary would like to hear? That I'm having an affair with a teacher? That I'm a member of a militant Muggle Supremacy group, working to bring down the Magical world from within?"

Meg laughed. "She also said you'd start making jokes if I tried to find out about you."

Lily looked disconcerted at this, but recovered almost immediately. "I just meant that I don't have anything to confide," she replied, with a shrug.

When Meg raised her eyebrows, Lily threw up her hands, torn between exasperation and amusement. "All right. What do you want to know?" she asked. Her smile had gone, but there was still a playful glimmer in her eyes.

Meg shrugged. "For starters, do you really like Roger Davies?" she asked bluntly. "Is he cerebral enough for you?"

Lily didn't know why, but this question was very unwelcome. She thought for a minute, before replying. "Of course I like him. He's a good person. He's got a social conscience. I admire him."

Meg looked pained. "'Good person'… 'social conscience'… 'admire'! Lily, that's awful!"

Lily blushed. "What's so awful about it?" she asked angrily.

"You can't go out with someone just because you endorse their politics!"

Lily felt definitely annoyed now. "It's not just because I… he's gentle and… he's not angry or cruel or interested in Dark Magic - ," she stopped, horrified with herself. Why had she said that? Why was it important that he wasn't interested in Dark Magic? Surely – _surely_ she wasn't going out with Roger Davies just because he was the exact opposite of Severus Snape?

Meg saw that she was painfully confused and replied, a little more gently, "come on, Lily. We're in the same boat, you and me. Nobody's good enough for us. All the boys we know are idiots. But we don't want to be alone. Everyone you go out with is going to be beneath you in one way or another, because, as I say, boys are thoughtless, insensitive idiots - ,"

In spite of herself, Lily gave a little laugh. It was quite funny to hear Meg Valance criticising people for being thoughtless and insensitive.

"But you just have to make sure that the thoughtless, insensitive idiot you end up with is one that you care about," Meg added, "because stupid as they are, it's unkind to them to lead them on."

Lily managed a shadow of her previous smile. "I'm surprised you think he's beneath me. I'm not a Valance. I'm about as far from a Valance as it's possible to be."

Meg slapped her on the back heartily. "You're Valance-like in character, my little muggle-born! Only you're a bit too polite – which is fine, in general, it's just, you know, when you're so polite that you start going out with someone you don't fancy, it's probably time to call it a day."

‹**×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

It transpired that the thing she had to see in order to properly understand the Valances was an enormous, barricaded set of doors. One half was hanging off its hinges. The other half had deep welts in the woodwork, as though it had been struck repeatedly with a battering ram.

"What's this?" Lily asked, running a finger over the splintered, tortured wood.

"This," said Meg, "is the library. I thought you'd like that bit," she added, seeing Lily's eyes light up. "But you might not like the rest. Come on in. Don't touch the left door."

Lily edged past the half-door which was hanging off its hinges, and found herself standing in the library of her dreams, although it seemed to have been the venue for a nightmare. On the one hand, it was a surprisingly dry and comfortable vaulted cellar, filled with ornately carved archways. The walls were set with bookshelves that extended far up into the gloomy shadows of the ceiling. On the other hand, Lily was disturbed to find that pictograms and symbols had been chalked haphazardly all over the floor; there was even the outline of a hand that had been chalked around. Lily bent down in the gloom to look at it; it had a finger missing.

There were also books lying, half-open, on the floor, with pages torn out of them. To Lily, this was like seeing a floor littered with desecrated corpses.

"What happened here?" she said.

Meg elaborated, with a certain amount of enthusiasm. Her formidable great aunt Guillotine Valance had once barricaded herself in here for six months, she said, while hoping to evade Ministry Law Enforcement Officers, who had come to arrest her for cannibalism. The siege of the Valance library was a horror story still ritualistically told to new recruits at the Department for Magical Law Enforcement.

"Cannibalism?" Lily demanded. "Who did she eat? She wasn't really guilty, was she?"

"Well, put it this way," Meg said airily, "she survived for six months down here, and they never found her children."

Lily wondered how many children you would have to eat in order to stay alive for six months, but decided not to enquire. Another question, though potentially as unwholesome as the first, occurred to her.

"Why did they call her Guillotine Valance?"

"Because of her sharp wit. And teeth."

Lily said nothing. She had never seen so many beautiful books in one place, but she didn't want to touch any of them, in case she discovered the whereabouts of that missing finger.

"Anyway, here it is," Meg said, "the site of Guillotine Valance's last stand." She spread her arms wide and looked around her. "Dad always said that when we Valances are shut indoors, and prevented from going to war, we go a bit crazy."

"Well, in that case, we'd better get you outside," Lily said with a smile, screwing up her courage and grabbing the nearest promising-looking book (_Magical Creatures in Poisons and Antidotes_) and thinking, with a pang, how much Severus would love this place.

All of a sudden, in the disconsolately draughty library, she missed him. It was like a sudden, bitter chill, creeping down her arms and legs, pricking her skin with little stabs of loss, and making her eyes sting with tears. All her anger at him – at herself – fused into this icy sadness, and all she could think, over and over, was that they could never rifle through this book together.

She had to get outside; things would seem clearer in the sunshine.

"You don't mind?" Meg asked, hurrying to catch up with her. "About me being related to a cannibal?"

"You can't help what your relatives did."

"It's just..." she twisted her fingers, uncharacteristically sheepish. "Well, everything's about who you're related to in the wizard world. And, if you can inherit glory, why can't you inherit guilt?"

Lily hesitated. She had never seen Meg like this. She _never_ worried about whether she had done something wrong. And the idea that her _relatives_ could have done something wrong was tantamount to heresy. But, Lily supposed, there weren't many ways you could justify the killing and eating of children.

"I guess you can't inherit glory or guilt," she said slowly. "I mean, it's not like red hair or freckles. It's not something that's encoded in your genes, is it?"

"I dunno," said Meg. "Madness might be."

Lily patted her on the shoulder. "Don't worry, Meg. Anyone who thinks that Bellatrix Black is an idiot definitely has their head screwed on the right way."

**‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

That night, Lily had nightmares about Guillotine Valance, whom she imagined as a cackling woman in a powdered wig with brown, broken teeth. At first she had been doing nothing more threatening than brandishing a letter from Hogwarts, which informed Lily that she had failed all her OWLs, but then the dream settled into a more familiar shape. It turned into the recurring nightmare that had troubled Lily from the age of twelve, in which she was being burned at the stake for witchcraft.

She was buffeted by palpable waves of dry heat; fumbling, clammy hands shoved her forward. Her own hands were tied behind her back, and she was wearing a loose white dress, plastered with ash and heaving with her short, panicky breaths. The crowd beneath her bristled with mutters and pitch-forks. She could hear the spitting and cracking of the fire, could see faces in the crowd below, made ruddy with the reflected firelight.

And then Guillotine Valance was tying her to the stake, leaning close, jeering at her. Her breath was hot and foul, and she had Silversmith's milky blue eyes.

Lily woke herself by crying out. Since she had the entire west wing to herself, she didn't startle anybody, but she tried to quiet herself all the same and lay back down, panting softly, determined to stay awake for a while so that she wouldn't sink into the same nightmare.

Dawn light was starting to appear now, dyeing the room blue. She rolled over to peer at her watch on the bedside table and saw that it was five thirty. She had woken up too early for Meg, who believed in hearty sleep and hearty breakfasts, so she decided to try and find Guillotine Valance in the portrait gallery.

She wanted to reason away her fears, or even be sure what they were, because her skin was still prickling with inexplicable suspense. It was this place, she thought – who could be reasonable in this dilapidated gothic castle, awash with eerie blue dawn-light, in which everything looked as if it were underwater?

She could still feel Guillotine Valance's clammy breath on her neck.

So she shook herself, pulled a dressing-gown over her pyjamas, and shuffled along the stone-flagged corridors, feeling the wonderful coolness of the stone against her bare feet.

Meg's house was a sprawling gothic castle gone slightly to seed. It had the same grey stone walls and stone-flagged floors as Hogwarts, with the same torches burning in brackets in little alcoves, and an impressive variety of weaponry mounted on the walls. A lot of these swords and axes appeared to be goblin-made; there were plaques underneath them with inscriptions such as 'Torn from the hands of Gornak the Unlikely by Roderick Valance at the Battle of Castlehaven, 1692'.

The cavernous entrance hall was the height of the entire house, criss-crossed with beams and oak stairwells. Lily tiptoed across it, anxious not to wake Silversmith.

She got the feeling this house hadn't been designed to be inhabited. It was more like a military museum. Where rugs softened the flagstone floor, it was for ostentation and not for comfort. They were either embroidered with the Valance coat of arms, or depicted dragons and Hippogriffs, mad-eyed and rearing, being ridden by armoured wizards brandishing swords. Lily amused herself for some moments by watching these little embroidered figures move. Their most probable action would have been to fall off their incensed steeds, but they defied expectation as well as gravity by staying put.

The house was very impressive, but a thick layer of greasy dust was over everything, and many parts of the castle, she soon learned, were derelict and boarded-up. It seemed that the Valances, with no spoils of war to enrich them, were finding that bravery and honour were not as profitable as they had once been.

Guillotine Valance actually proved to be very beautiful, though with a cruel, pointed mouth rather like Andromeda Black's. (Lily supposed it was not impossible that they were related, since all the pure-blood wizard families had inter-married).

She was strangely colourless, with her white-blonde hair only a fraction darker than her porcelain skin. Her dress was also white – a complicated arrangement of silk, lace and taffeta, in varying shades of milk-white, ice-white, parchment-white, porridge-white. Her eyes, by contrast, were very dark brown and glittered with sardonic amusement.

As she noticed Lily, Guillotine Valance gave a wink and snapped her sharp little teeth playfully.

Lily understood that she was probably something of a tourist attraction in the Valance house, and liked to play up to her reputation. Before she knew it – and against her better judgement – she was smiling back.

Guillotine Valance had a black velvet choker, from which hung a silver pendant – a bright green eye mounted in a silver triangle. It had been painted with bewitching clarity. She wouldn't have been surprised if it had blinked.

"Oh, little girl, little girl," she heard Guillotine Valance murmur, in a tone of chilling tenderness, "If I only had your eyes, I could make a set of matching earrings."

Lily coloured slightly, but still suspected that this remark was playful. It was probable that Guillotine Valance frequently entertained herself, and others, by being as dastardly as possible.

She gazed defiantly back, and even thought that the corners of Guillotine Valance's pointed mouth turned upwards slightly, but this was all she had time to think because the next instant she was jolted back to her senses by the sound of a breathless voice at her elbow.

"She was innercent, y'know."

It was Silversmith. He was standing very close to her, breathing hard and looking unaccountably triumphant.

Meg was floors away and she wasn't allowed to do magic.

She realised suddenly (because in the grip of extreme emotions Lily often became detached and analytical) what his jerky, irregular movements reminded her of: the way a spider moved. Like a spider, he was always lurking around the skirting-boards, motionless, but dreadfully conspicuous, and then scuttling sharply, suddenly into view. In fact, she felt the same fascinated revulsion towards him that she felt for spiders.

"Oh, what would you know?" Guillotine Valance muttered disdainfully. "Skulking around the house of my ancestors, not even dusting properly. You disgust me."

Silversmith ignored her. "They never found 'er children because they was took from 'er. Ent that right, madam?"

Guillotine Valance turned her head disdainfully, and said nothing.

Lily's curiosity was battling with her fear. Part of her was casting around for an excuse to leave immediately, to get out of Silversmith's disquieting presence and have a lie down, and the rest was wondering about Guillotine Valance. Eventually, she said: "did you know her?"

"When I was young," he said. "Came with 'er 'usband, didn't I? We was both muggles."

"I didn't know that," she said, casting an apologetic glance at Guillotine Valance.

"Her children was took," Silversmith insisted. "It was a plot ter get rid of the Valances."

She wondered why Silversmith was telling her all this. She could see that he was enjoying himself; his words were gleefully dramatic and his eyes were… well, they were too creamy to shine exactly, but they certainly had a greasy sheen that Lily had never seen there before. Perhaps he was rarely listened-to amongst the Valances, and was dying for an audience.

Lily exerted herself to be kind. "And who would want to get rid of the Valances?" she asked.

"Oh, really," Guillotine Valance interrupted, "bad enough I have to hang up here, as an object of ghoulish curiosity for every passer-by of indifferent pedigree, without having my family name besmirched by a glorified _janitor_."

Lily, despite hearing herself referred to as a 'passer-by of indifferent pedigree' couldn't help liking Guillotine Valance. She sounded a lot like Meg.

"We'd better not talk about this any more," she said matter-of-factly. "It's upsetting her. And this is her house, after all. Thank you for confiding in me, Mr Silversmith, but I really think it would be disrespectful for you to say any more. I think I'm going to go and find Meg," she added, hoping that he wouldn't offer to assist her.

And, miraculously, wonderfully, he turned his eyes away, shrugging. Lily seized her opportunity – with a respectful nod to Guillotine Valance, which could not quite conceal her elation – she hurried from the room. 


	8. Chapter 8: The Slytherin Common Room

In some ways, going back to the Slytherin common-room after the holidays was like coming home for Severus. It was a cool little haven of shadow – and there were plenty of out-of-the-way places in which to curl up with a book on dark magic, and plot hideous revenges on the Gryffindor Quidditch team.

People there were _interested_ in magic – oh, they would still mock you for saying the wrong thing, or having an inferior blood-line – and they would probably mock you with more persistence than an idiot Gryffindor knew how to command – but no branch of magic was frowned upon here. The Slytherins understood that there was nothing intrinsically good or bad about magic, only the uses it was put to.

The common-room itself was dark and luxurious. It did not immediately look like the sort of room that would have been comfortable. The walls were cold stone (and usually rather damp), there were no windows, the ceiling was low and the floor uncarpeted, but capacious leather arm-chairs dotted the room, and every once in a while you stepped on a rug so soft and lusciously thick that you sank several inches into it (in fact, there was one - known collectively and affectionately amongst the Slytherins as 'Quick-Sandy' - that wouldn't let your feet go once you had sunken into it, unless you started singing. Nowadays, she only ensnared first-years and visitors from other houses, because everyone else knew to jump over her). The massive stone fireplace gave off a powerful heat, and the sickly scent of the smoke emanating from it made the air thick.

The room resembled a fascinating hunting lodge. There were animal heads on the walls, but these were of werewolves and manticores, rather than stags and bears. There were glass cases containing curious objects - a unicorn's horn, for example, and an enormous talon, with a milky-white stone clasped within it. This, a card beneath the case informed the reader, had been the talon of Rowena Ravenclaw's giant eagle and what it clutched within it was petrified memory - Ravenclaw's memories, frozen in stone, and inaccessible, even to the most brilliant wizarding minds. Many wondered why Ravenclaw had set posterity an unsolvable puzzle, but these were generally the people who didn't know enough about Rowena Ravenclaw to understand that most of the puzzles she had set were unsolvable to anyone but her.

The room was a testament to the power of curiosity. You would be more comfortable in the Gryffindor common-room, but not so well-informed. Slytherins, like all good academics, never really relaxed.

Reclining luxuriously by the fire was Bellatrix Black. Her eyes were heavily-lidded, and these lids had long, thick, drooping lashes, so that only the odd flash of dark iris could be seen beneath them. She looked as though she couldn't be bothered to open her eyes properly. She (like her sister) seemed permanently, imperiously bored but (unlike her sister) this expression was not softened by a pretty face.

She was stroking a tortoiseshell cat that had settled on her lap. As Snape watched, she pointed her wand at it, and said, almost lazily: 'Crucio'.

Where Lily had an embarrassing excess of tenderness, Bellatrix had a worrying excess of aggression. It came out in odd and unexpected ways. For example, if you made her laugh (something that Snape tried to avoid anyway, because of the ear-splitting sound), she would slap or punch you hard on the arm in what she evidently assumed was an affectionate manner. He had also found that it was generally advisable not to sneak up on her.

"New pet, Bella?" he asked cautiously.

"It's Pettigrew's."

"Oh." Snape brightened a little. He thought for a while, and then said. "You should do that in front of him."

Bella was cruel, but not particularly ingenious. Sometimes she needed a push in the right (or rather, wrong) direction. She seemed preoccupied at the moment, however.

"Snape," she murmured, watching the cat struggle under her wand. "Do you think some people feel pain more than others?"

Snape tried to think of a response that would neither amuse nor provoke her. He was always looking for this magical middle-ground with Bellatrix, but kept missing it, perhaps because it was only an inch wide, perhaps because it was nonexistent.

"I think you're creative enough to make up the deficit, Bella."

She laughed and slapped him, this time around the face.

"Did you finish Slughorn's Antidotes essay?" she went on casually.

Snape was still holding his face. He was very angry with himself. "No, I'll do it tomorrow. I've got another detention with Dumbledore." In a voice dripping with disdain, he added. "This time, he assures me, there will be chocolate biscuits."

Bella shrugged contemptuously. It was amazing how much she resembled her cousin, Sirius, when she did this. "What kind of a teacher is he?"

"The senile kind," Snape said, without thinking.

Bella laughed again and punched him on the arm. Fortunately, she was distracted from any further demonstrations of approval by the entrance of Avery, Wilkes and Rodolphus Lestrange, Bella's long-suffering boyfriend.

Rodolphus was pale and listless. He had a very long face. He was slow on the uptake, but once he'd got an idea into his head, he didn't let it go. Bellatrix had decided that she was going to marry him sometime in their third year, and there was no arguing with Bellatrix (or, at least, not for Rodolphus).

Wilkes was thick-set and freckled. Avery was thin and elfish. He had rather pointed ears and teeth. Of the three, he was the only one with a glimmering of intelligence, but he would only apply it in the cause of cruelty. On the single occasion he had received a good mark in Transfiguration, (on the day they had been transforming toads into tea-cups), Avery had stolen Mary Macdonald's toad to transfigure and, when it was a perfect tea-cup, smashed it right in front of her. He had even stamped on the shattered pieces (which, to Snape's mind, had been somewhat excessive. It had looked like the sort of absent-minded savagery that Bellatrix usually came out with).

He remembered waiting with Lily outside Professor McGonagall's office while the pieces of teacup were painstakingly reassembled back into a toad.

Mary had emerged from the office, red-faced and panting, and when Lily had said: "What happened, Mary? Is he… is he dead?", Mary had burst into tears and run off up the corridor in hysterics.

"I'd call that a big 'yes'" Snape had said, leaning against the wall and staring indifferently after her.

"I'll get him for this." Lily had said, her low voice prickling with quiet ferocity.

"It's only a toad."

"Oh, 'only a toad', 'only a Muggle'! Everything's always 'only' to you, isn't it? Don't you care about anything?"

Snape hadn't known what to say to this, so he had let her storm off up the corridor after Mary.

This had been the beginning of a bitter feud between Mary Macdonald and Avery, which, for a while, had taken the form of a friendly contest between Snape and Lily, to see who could teach their friends the best hexes to use against their enemy. Snape had, of course, prudently let her win. He hadn't wanted her to know how many horrific curses he was familiar with.

Avery, Wilkes and Rodolphus settled in the good seats by the fire (turfing out some first-year girls, who had already been sitting in them) and slouched with the languorous arrogance that only teenage boys can pull off.

"Hey, Severus?" Avery said, taking a copy of a magazine, Manic and Magical Monsters, out of his bag (Avery's favourite subject was Care of Magical Creatures, though the creatures in question had to have pretty big fangs in order to excite his interest). "You know that Ravenclaw Quidditch Captain? Davey? The one who's going out with your red-haired Mudblood friend?"

Snape closed his eyes momentarily and then said, in a hollow voice: "'Mudblood friend' is a contradiction in terms."

Bellatrix barked with laughter and punched him again. This time, though, Snape felt her attack as a welcome distraction from a different kind of pain, and he almost smiled at her.

"Well," Avery went on, "McGonagall's just given him about a month's worth of detentions. Apparently, he was trying to break into Madam Hooch's office to jinx the Gryffindor team's broomsticks. Don't think his Mudblood was too pleased with him. In fact, I have it on good authority that his Mudblood finished with him. Imagine how you'd feel if even a Mudblod didn't want you!"

Snape didn't need to imagine, but was too happy to dwell on that fact now. A grin spread irresistibly across his sallow face. And the best part was, he didn't even have to hide it. It was practically _admirable_ for a Slytherin to be happy about the misfortunes of a Quidditch Player from a rival house.

Of course, this didn't change anything about Potter. Potter was still going to pay.

He spent the rest of the evening waiting around for Narcissa to make an appearance in the common-room. She wouldn't be keen to speak to him, because she knew he was friends with Lucius Malfoy – if the term 'friendship' could really be applied to a cautious, tactical alliance between Slytherins. But he needed her key to the Black family vault, and her icy disdain would be positively soothing after all her sister's slaps and punches. Maybe that was why Mr and Mrs Black had brought Narcissa up to be so cold – they knew that a soothing ice-pack would be required after Bella's fiery excesses.

When she eventually swanned into the room, she was a picture of elegance. She wore the same school-uniform as everyone else but, somehow, she managed to make it look like an expensive, designer evening-dress from Madam Malkin's.

She was very thin – Snape suspected she had been making use of the Dark Diets book in the Restricted Section – and glacial, both in manner and appearance. Her features were delicate and exquisite, as though they had been sculpted out of ice, and her eyes were grey and dead-looking, like Dementor flesh.

Snape had spoken to her only once before, in Knockturn Alley, in the Tavern opposite Borgin and Burkes, the Hanged Man. He had been explaining to Lucius Malfoy how to use Undetectable Poisons (which needed to be Disillusioned before they were administered), and she had waltzed in, with her House Elf behind her carrying a teetering stack of boxes. Flirting was difficult for Narcissa, because she never seemed to smile, but she had stared through her delicate eyelashes at Malfoy while he flirted with her, and wrinkled her nose at Snape. If someone was powerful, however, Narcissa learned to be civil to them, and she had evidently sensed power in Snape, because she had deigned to give him a haughty little nod when she passed him in the corridors ever since.

Malfoy had had his eye on her ever since she was born. There were only so many pure-blood witches, and he was adamant that, if he was going to marry one of the Black sisters, it was going to be the prettiest. Snape had advised him to give the compulsively sadistic Bellatrix a wide berth (though, as it turned out, Lucius rather liked aggressive women). Andromeda, who was haughty and impressive, but outspoken and full of dangerous opinions, was probably not going to meet with Malfoy's approval either, so that just left the Ice Queen.

Snape liked her better than the other Black sisters, though there was no denying that she was tedious. Her conversation was almost alarmingly shallow. Whenever he sat near her and her friends at the Slytherin table, the incessant babble about dress robes, parties and love potions made his head hurt.

When Snape approached her in the common room, she brushed her hair out of her eyes with unconscious elegance and blinked enquiringly at him.

"Have you come to apologise for him?" she asked coldly. "I should have known he'd send one of his lackeys to do his dirty work."

Snape shook his head calmly. "No, I haven't. This leaves two possibilities. Either I'm not Malfoy's lackey, or he didn't even consider you worth a lackey. I do hope you'll opt for the former. It's the one most flattering to both of us, after all."

He would not have thought it possible but Narcissa seemed to grow paler. The effect of this was to make her almost translucent. "I'm sorry," she mumbled, clearing the books from the armchair next to her so that he could sit down. "What do you want?"

He surveyed her coldly before sitting down. Some civil preliminaries were clearly required before he got to the point. "I came to see how you were." He smiled slightly, then added. "You looked terrible in the Great Hall this evening."

"Thank you for your concern, Severus," she muttered. A blush looked as though it was trying to surface through the thick ice of her complexion. "But I'll be fine. Mr Malfoy is not the only pure-blood wizard in the world."

This was like modifying the phrase 'There are plenty more fish in the sea' to read 'There are about five more fish in the sea', and Narcissa seemed to know it, because she gave a delicate little cough (nothing as vulgar as a laugh had been known to issue from that perfect little mouth), and continued.

"After all, I have a great deal to recommend me."

"Certainly," he said

She sniffed. "I keep listening to that muggle song 'Unbreak My Heart'. It's perfect."

"It would be perfect if it was called 'Un-sleep With My Sister'."

Narcissa collapsed into tears again. Snape sighed wearily and decided it would probably be best to come back later.


	9. Chapter 9: Hemlock and Vanilla

Narcissa Black's dressing table was legendary. It was littered with glass bottles and phials, each filled with a different coloured liquid - purple, greenish silver, mother-of-pearl, and even one that changed colour every time you looked at it - some gurgling and fizzing as though trying to escape their bottles. They might have been harmless perfumes, but it was popularly rumoured that many contained poisons and love potions. There were soft, multi-coloured Fwooper-feather brushes, tubs of powder, and pungent, heavy-scented creams. Here and there, she would leave a black opal broche, an ornate silver bracelet set with glimmering emeralds, but none of the other girls in her dormitory ever touched these valuable jewels. It was widely-known that Black family heirlooms could not be touched by non-members of the family - at least, not without incurring blisters, boils, un-removable stinks, even swarms of flies - the Black witches were jealous of their treasures and creative in their cursing.

In the drawers beneath, there were handbooks on magical vanity, detailing the often malignant spells that could keep witches thin, unblemished and glowing with apparent health. Dark Magic, after all, was about gaining power, and there was no doubt that beauty conferred power. The idea that beauty could be enjoyed for its own sake had never occurred to Narcissa; she would have found it rather selfish.

This was Narcissa's laboratory. All the Black sisters were experimental - which was odd for girls who had been brought up to believe that the old ways and old blood-lines must be preserved at any cost. Bellatrix experimented with the science of cruelty, but this was too crude for Narcissa. She was naturally very indolent - not troubled with the fervour and zeal that afflicted Bella - but it did not follow that she was therefore lazy. She, like all Dark witches, wanted to experiment, wanted to test the limits of what magic could do and, more specifically (because the lust for power was in her blood, after all), what it could do for her.

She was not clever but she had a good eye for what suited her, and a great deal of money, which meant that she could acquire the most potent and exotic magical ingredients without too much difficulty. Sometimes, she would buy an ingredient - powdered werewolf tooth, spine of lionfish, crushed scarab beetles, or leaves from the Indonesian Butterfly Tree - for no particular reason, just because it looked good or sounded promising. She would put them away -folded carefully in tissue paper - and wait until a possibility occurred to her.

She had heard that unicorn blood, when rubbed into the skin, would prevent a woman from ever getting wrinkles, but Narcisa had never been able to get hold of this precious commodity, even with her vast fortune. It didn't bother her much, because she didn't need it yet, and when she did, she would have a lifetime's worth of favours to call in.

Of course, where she had any doubt about an ingredient, she would never experiment on herself. Her face was too valuable, both for her own prospects and her family's, to risk. She needed to make a good, pure-blood marriage, and she wanted power in her own right. She wanted to set her whiles to work in the Ministry for Magic, in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement or the Department of International Magical Co-operation - somewhere she could make a difference.

Occasionally, she would pay fellow-students to try out her new potions and cosmetics. More often, however, she would plant them in the drinks of unsuspecting muggle-borns or Gryffindors. That way, if they went wrong, she was at least making a political statement.

Narcissa wasn't too interested in politics yet. Beyond the odd nose-wrinkling, Mudblood-calling activities that most of her fellow-Slytherins indulged in, she was content to let her enemies be.

But when she got to the Ministry of Magic, all that was going to change. Quietly, charmingly, without impassioned speeches or vulgar campaigning, but in the background, whispering in the ears of Ministers and Judges while her perfume worked on their senses, she was going to get her way.

When painting her nails or mirror-gazing, Narcissa could hypnotise herself into a state of calm, dauntless knowing. Everything would become clear to her: which colours to mix, which scents could influence the feelings of her prey, and in which directions. In this hypnotised state, possibilities would occur to her, combinations, experiments. She liked to think of this creative process as listening to her blood. She believed that great power, instinct, even intelligence, flowed through her veins, inherited from her noble ancestors, concentrated by their uncorrupted lineage.

The results of these entranced ideas were not always what she had hoped but she made the occasional break-through. She had discovered, for example, that a potion made from Billywig Stings (the Billywig was an Australian insect whose sting caused people to levitate temporarily), if taken every day, would eliminate the need for a witch to wear a bra.

Even when her ideas did not work, Narcissa was not the sort of girl to be disheartened, because she had never _been_ heartened, and she was always careful to ensure that any unpleasant side-effects of her experiments were restricted to her enemies.

At the moment, she was holding a little glass bottle embossed with delicate white bones from a Golden Snidget's wing. They were in place to keep the oily, black potion within from decaying. The bottle was filled with Acromantula Venom - non-lethal in small doses; in fact, a tiny drop actually caused the cheeks to glow and the eyes to sparkle, because it induced a mild fever. She had discovered this by slipping a little into Mary MacDonald's pumpkin juice. The Mudblood had never looked so good.

Narcissa sighed. People really did not appreciate what she did for them, what she did for women everywhere.

Tonight, however, she doubted she would be using the contents of this bottle for cosmetic purposes. Tonight, she was turning her cool, methodical attention to the business of revenge. She was sedentary and indolent by nature, but she could still feel anger; it made her brow wrinkle in a way she didn't like.

Narcissa rhythmically dabbed blusher onto her high, delicate cheek-bones and pondered.

Ten minutes later, she glided down the stairs to the Slytherin common room and scanned the crowd for Severus Snape.

She was glowing with the consciousness of her beauty (which, of course, only enhanced it). Her skin was white and disconcertingly matte, like powdered snow that had been crushed and compacted into a flawless finish. Her eyes were hooded with shimmering green eye-shadow (made from powdered dragon scales) and she had dabbed her neck with Befuddlement Perfume, a mixture of Hemlock and vanilla that reduced the intelligence of any man who inhaled it. Of course, it meant that if anyone kissed her on the neck, they would be poisoned. She was going to have to remember to stop using it when she went on dates. At the moment, however, she was not interested in that kind of thing. She wanted power, not passion.

She would discover passion later. In fact, eventually, she would be its slave but, at the moment, she didn't care whether the men who kissed her neck did get poisoned. As far as she was concerned, it was a fitting punishment for the audacity of touching her.

She had discovered that some men were immune to her cosmetic ingenuity, but she had never thought that this might be because they were already in love. Love was a subject Narcissa seldom thought of; she was not sentimental; like all good pure-blood witches, she considered love as a superfluous ingredient in life (it was especially superfluous in marriage). As a means of gaining power, it was too uncertain, and as a means of receiving comfort, it was too unreliable. Better to put your trust in what you could control.

She found Severus Snape in a corner of the Common Room, hunched in a chair beside the fire. He looked tense - like a tightly-wound spring, poised to recoil at anyone who approached him. He was often like this; solitary but vicious. He reminded Narcissa of a Copperhead snake or a stalking jungle cat. She approved of these images; they invested Snape with the grace and beauty that he so conspicuously lacked.

Narcissa was breathtakingly shallow, and so would normally wrinkle her nose at Snape for his greasy hair and sallow skin, his jerky movements and perpetual frown. He was not normally someone she would allow herself to be seen with, but there was something impressive about his fierce, unhappy face.

She didn't think he was too clever to be manipulated - Narcissa's magic could not be undone by cleverness - but she determined to be careful with him all the same.

"You were going to ask me something," she said abruptly, hands on her hips, "when you spoke to me earlier today."

Snape looked up from his book. For a moment, his face was inscrutable, but then it curved into a smile.

"I was just concerned about you," he said.

"You really weren't sent by him to keep an eye on me?"

"By who?"

"Luci -," Narcissa stopped. She couldn't bring herself to say his first name. "Mr Malfoy," she corrected herself smoothly.

"No."

Snape's voice was gentle but Narcissa still bristled. So Mr Malfoy didn't even think she was worth an apology! She calmed herself, however, and pressed her face into a smile.

Snape was considering her with the same inscrutable expression that had puzzled her to begin with.

"I heard from a girl in your dormitory that you have Acromantula venom," he said.

Narcissa smiled. She leaned closer to him, so that he could smell her perfume. "You won't tell Slughorn, will you?" she whispered.

"He'd probably try to buy it off you," Snape said with a shrug. "But no, I won't tell him. Where did you get it?"

"I have an uncle who works in the Office of Confiscated Magical Substances. He brings me lots of things."

Snape made a mental note of this.

Narcissa sat on the arm of his chair and leaned down so that she could whisper in his ear. She smelled sickly sweet - a scent that reminded Snape of rotting hot-house flowers, but he didn't draw back when she leaned forward.

"I need your help, Severus," she said. "You see, I need to get even with him. For the sake of my family's honour. You can understand that, can't you? I mean, you're half-muggle but -,"

Snape raised his eyebrows, but Narcissa recovered beautifully.

"The Princes," she said, "were a fine wizarding family. They even had a connection with the Blacks, going back to when Claudia Black -,"

" - Married Moribund Prince," he interrupted. "I know."

Narcissa leaned forward again. Her lips were almost touching his ear. "Then you'll know that members of the Black family always avenge their wrongs. I am going to poison Lucius Malfoy."

Snape could absorb any amount of shocking information without the barest flicker of surprise. He never had any trouble believing the worst of people. So there was nothing but simple curiosity in his voice when he asked:

"Aren't you a little young to be plotting murder?"

"I'm fifteen," Narcissa protested, in her warm, forceful, fragrant whisper. "Claudia Black was fifteen when she married your ancestor."

Snape wasn't quite sure what she was getting at there, but he listened politely all the same.

For the first time, Narcissa's voice resonated with enthusiasm. "My great grandmother poisoned six husbands and eight lovers. My grandmother made a coat out of the skins of muggles who failed to show her the proper respect (she said it repelled jinxes because it was so thoroughly un-magical). My mother transfigured a servant who'd been stealing from her into a hind and had her dogs chase him across the moors until they tore him apart."

"Well, at least she was sporting about it," Snape said.

"My point is that Black women are not to be trifled with."

Severus thought that 'trifled with' was a rather mild expression for what Malfoy had been doing to Bellatrix at his manor house during the holidays. Not for the first time, he regretted being privy to so much sensitive information.

"So what do you intend to do to Malfoy?" he asked.

Narcissa shrugged languidly. "I was thinking of Amortentia."

Again, Severus exhibited no surprise. "That's a very complicated potion," he said mechanically, as though reading these lines from a script. "You'd probably need an experienced potion-brewer to help you."

Narcissa smiled. "He'd have to be absolutely the best in the school," she said artfully. "Or I wouldn't trust him with such a delicate operation."

Snape raised his eyebrows. "I think we could manage that."

"You'd do it for me?" she asked softly.

Snape hesitated. He was angry; he could feel it bubbling under his skin, always just beneath the surface. It was a kind of constant background drone. He wanted to hurt Lily, just to get her attention, just to get her to _look_ at him again, and he hated himself for it.

Suddenly, he found himself looking into Narcissa's dead, grey eyes and feeling sick.

But this was all he had now. The past was wrecked. And if that was gone, it didn't matter what else he wrecked.

"Yes," he said. "I'll do it. But maybe you could do something for me in return."

Narcissa's charming smile faltered, but she recovered magnificently. "Anything."

"I need you to fetch the Dark Snitch from your family vault, and make sure Potter gets hold of it."

Narcissa hesitated. She didn't understand Quidditch, but she was quite well-versed in dark magic, and she knew the Dark Snitch's reputation. Still, she was un-shockable. After all, murder and curses – if inflicted on the right people – were time-honoured traditions in her family.

Her first, instinctive, thought was: what right does this skinny son-of-a-muggle have to plot the ruin of pure-blood wizards? But that was soon replaced by the equally snobbish consideration that the pure-bloods he was targeting were an embarrassment to their family names in any case. It would be no loss to the wizarding world if a blood-traitor like Potter was prudently disposed of. And, if Sirius got in the way – as he always did when Potter was involved – then a potential source of embarrassment to her own family would be removed as well.

Of course, she didn't necessarily want him dead. Just humbled. Perhaps Severus Snape wanted the same thing – although it was difficult to believe at this moment, as she stared into his smouldering black eyes.

"Very well," she said, smoothing out the creases in her skirt. "And, in return, you will brew the Amortentia? And make sure Malfoy drinks it?"

He nodded briefly. "It might kill him, you know."

Narcissa gave him a withering look. She wanted to say that she knew more about love potions than he could possibly imagine; she wanted to say that every girl in her family had been brought up to experiment with them from the age of five. But it was vulgar to advertize one's own gifts, especially when she had more immediately noticeable gifts which would always keep her interlocutor's eyes busy.

Snape's eyes didn't linger on her as much as she would have liked, though. He was staring angrily into the middle distance, as though seeing a whole parade of humiliations and bitter memories pass before his eyes. He frightened her a little, when he was too lost in fury to notice her charms. It made her feel powerless, and she was not accustomed to feeling powerless.

"Tell me what you want me to do," she said, in an effort to nudge him out of his preoccupation.

He blinked, re-focused on her, and said: "Get the Dark Snitch from the vault and take it to the locker-room after the Gryffindor team's practice tomorrow night. Potter always hangs around there with his cronies, milking their praise." That last sentence was spat out with venom. "Let him see you trying to plant the box in Madam Hooch's locker. Let him think he's discovered an attempted sabotage – just so long as he gets his hands on the Dark Snitch. His own ego will do the rest."

"Is he going to believe I'd be that stupid?" Narcissa asked. "Planting the snitch in the locker room immediately after the Gryffindor team practice?"

"Trust me," said Snape darkly, "he'll be too caught up in his own cleverness to consider your stupidity."

Narcissa sniffed. She didn't really like the way that had been phrased.

Still, it would be no great stretch to fool Potter. She was a good actress. Women who set out to trap rich pure-bloods into marriage had to be. She was pretty enough and rich enough not to need the traps, of course, but there was an art to it. It was her family craft; the consuming passion of all her ingenious female ancestors, and Narcissa idolized her female ancestors above everyone else in the world.

Somehow, she sensed that Severus Snape would give her plenty of scope for her wiles. For the first time, she was beginning to realize how satisfying it would be to be an active participant in your own success, rather than having it handed to you on a plate. Severus wouldn't understand that, of course. Probably, nothing had ever been handed to _him_ on a plate until somebody else had finished with it. But still, there was something enthralling about his dark eyes and his nervous energy. She knew immediately that she needed to stay on his good side.


	10. Chapter 10: Knockturn Alley

Lucius Malfoy had milky-blonde hair and a sneering, lop-sided smile, which women seemed to find irresistible. He was practically royalty in the wizarding world, so old and well respected was his family. He radiated an air of authority that could send people scuttling away, scattering apologies and belongings alike, as they hurried to get out of his grave, dark-blue gaze. Yet, for all his advantages, he was solemn and joyless. He didn't seem to enjoy his fortune or his popularity with women; they were things to be exhibited, not enjoyed, as marks of his status. He saw the degeneration of wizarding society everywhere, and he seemed to be taking it personally.

He hadn't always been like this. The Hogwarts teachers remembered him as a marauding, skirt-chasing libertine, who sank his teeth into every physical pleasure his vast fortune could provide, sneaking fire-whisky into his dormitory, getting caught in a broom cupboard with the pretty Defence Against the Dark Arts Teacher, Professor Moorland, who'd had to retire in disgrace, even experimenting with the three Unforgettable Curses (which were banned for use by under-eighteens). But then, a year after leaving the school, Lucius Malfoy had had an epiphany.

The story went that he had woken up one morning, to the sounds of his own personal wizard orchestra, between sheets of finest silk embroidered with gold brocade, surrounded by beautiful women, two of whom were kissing each other, and thought: there has to be more to life than this.

Snape found him waiting at the entrance to Knockturn Alley, as they had arranged. Lucius was gazing with furrowed brow at a rowdy group of red-haired children, who were daring each other to go into Knockturn Alley. As they noticed Lucius, the colour drained visibly from their faces, and they shuffled closer together.

"Don't meddle with things you can't handle, blood-traitor brats," he growled. It was barely more than a whisper, but the children scattered all the same, yelping as though they had been stung.

Snape was in awe of this ability to command instant terror. He watched, enthralled, as Lucius gave a dignified sniff and turned into Knockturn Alley. The lurking shoppers that thronged the street melted out of his way instantly.

"Come with me, Severus," he murmured, in a slightly softened voice. "Let me show you the life you are destined for."

Snape looked around. He had been to Knockturn Alley many times before. His parents had never cared where he got to, so he had spent a lot of time down this street, staring hungrily in at the windows of Borgin and Burkes (looking at shrunken heads, pickled toads, werewolf teeth), snatching at scraps of overheard conversations about Unforgivable Curses and Inferi. He was fascinated by this secret world of old, combative magic. He knew the vendors of the street very well, since many of them had chased him away from their shops or stalls at some point during his childhood.

There was the witch - Jenny Greenteeth (it did not take much imagination to see how she'd got her name) - who tried to sell human hair and fingernails, which she displayed proudly on a tray, occasionally rattling this under the noses of passing pedestrians (except she knew, somehow, who the important ones were, because she backed away from Malfoy in an obsequious crouch whenever he came down the street). She claimed that her gruesome wares were collected from important Ministry of Magic officials, who could then be controlled or tortured if the specimens were used in certain potions. She even said she had the Minister for Magic's side-burns, and the nostril hair of the Head of the Auror Office. This would have been more convincing if all of the hair she displayed was not the same muddy blonde colour as her own.

A tabby cat with tattered ears wound its way between people's legs. This was rumoured to be an Animagus who got stuck in his animal form twenty years ago. As a human, he'd been a famous Auror, and it was said that even as a cat, he still followed Dark Wizards obsessively. Malfoy always made a point of stroking him.

Black ivy twisted itself around the street-lamps, shading the light and occasionally snaking across the shoulders of any lingering pedestrians, like an over-friendly salesman. It was a bad idea to stay in one place for too long when you came down Knockturn Alley.

Outside Borgin and Burkes there was a goblin pushing a wheelbarrow, the contents of which were covered by a greying sheet. This discrete effect was ruined by the lifeless hand hanging out beneath the sheet, trailing in the scummy puddles as the goblin walked along. Snape had seen these kind of vendors before - Carrion Pigeons, they were called. There was a trade in human flesh down Knockturn Alley - both the living and the dead kind.

A peeling, wooden sign over a set of cellar steps next to Borgin and Burkes read: Dancing Girls: Metamorphmagi - Veela - Scarlet Women.

Snape didn't know what Scarlet Women were. He idly hoped that they were women with scarlet hair, like his Lily. In later years, he would find out that they were bored housewives, who had overdosed on a potion called Rosura, which was designed to help you find even the most unpleasant or familiar people attractive. If you took too much, the effects were permanent; Scarlet Women were driven wild with desire by any man they saw, but the potion had an unfortunate side-effect. It turned the skin permanently red. If you were not put off by this, they were fun. Lucius had once smuggled a pair of them into Professor Dumbledore's office, in the hope that they might tempt him. Dumbledore had given them a cup of tea and a bag of Lemondrops each and sent them home.

Snape remembered the obligatory talk on Potion Abuse that his class had endured in their first year at Hogwarts. Slughorn had turned pink and plunged into this memorised monologue, his moustache rustling in a breathless kind of way:

"A true potion-maker exercises self-restraint. A wizard can use potions to solve many of life's little problems - timidity, unhappiness, unattractiveness."

He waited resignedly for the sniggers to die down.

"But these are only temporary solutions," he went on. "Prolonged use of potions can result in quite horrific - and irreversible - side effects. If you over-indulge in mood-altering potions, for example, you become unable to moderate the tone of your voice. You have to shout everything, to everyone."

"I've got that, Sir!" bellowed Sirius Black.

Slughorn's moustache twitched. "What a shame for Gryffindor House. Your unfortunate condition has just lost them five points."

More sniggers - this time from the Slytherins. Snape was pleased to see Lily sinking her face into her hands.

"I will refrain from mentioning the debilitating side effects that ensue if you overdose on -," he cleared his throat awkwardly - "Enlarging Potions."

It was a full five minutes before the class stopped laughing this time. Clouds of dust, and the odd spider, were dislodged from the ceiling.

Slughorn was obviously used to this. He began examining his fingernails languidly, as though he found nothing more soothing than the sound of children's laughter.

"Therefore, let me advise you all to be vigilant. Potions are useful shortcuts; they create results that you would ordinarily have to work very hard for and, as such, they are highly addictive. They must be judiciously and sparingly used in day-to-day life. Judgement and self-restraint are qualities that every good potion-maker must cultivate."

There was a pet shop in Knockturn Alley too - the display window was stacked with glass cases displaying tangles of writhing snakes, sleek black rats, and water-tanks filled with leering Grindylows. Crows shuffled and croaked on their perches beside some mournful grey-green birds with deep-set, hooded eyes: these, Snape had discovered, were Augureys; their cries were once believed to cause instant death, but it was now known that they sang only when it was about to rain. Severus could only assume that Dark Wizards kept them in order to frighten the credulous and create a forbidding atmosphere around their homes.

The Hanged Man was almost empty. It was, for a pub in Knockturn Alley, surprisingly clean and comfortable. It looked a lot like the Slytherin common-room, with plush carpets, creaking leather arm-chairs and severed werewolf-heads mounted on the walls. Only the windows were grimy - and Snape suspected that this was for pragmatic reasons, to ensure that nobody could peer in, because the window-frames were spotless.

Lucius nodded curtly to the bar-tender, a badly-shaven man with stooping shoulders and dark circles under his eyes. He was trembling uncontrollably, and dropped a glass when Lucius looked over at him.

"Why does he shake like that?" Severus asked as they made their way into a badly-lit corridor behind the bar.

"He's cursed," Lucius said shortly. "He angered the Dark Lord - and the Dark Lord's curses are as enduring as they are ingenious. He cannot eat or sleep; he cannot rest. His only duty is to serve the Death Eaters. If he does that, the symptoms are alleviated somewhat, for a time. Since he proved himself untrustworthy, the Dark Lord decided that this was the best way to ensure his loyalty."

Severus was enthralled. "How did he do that?" he asked.

Lucius smiled indulgently. "Cursing - that is, the exertion of your will upon another - is one of the first things he will teach you, if you care to learn. Your foolish Headmaster imagines that magic is a co-operative, rather than a competitive, enterprise. But all magic is about control; it is about imposing your will on others, or on your surroundings. It is about making your mark on this weak world, by whatever means necessary."

Severus listened eagerly, but said nothing. Perhaps Lucius Malfoy was used to these awed silences from his companions, because he didn't seem to notice Severus again until they reached a dark, smoky room off the corridor, accessible through a beaded curtain of dark green stones. A powerful scent was emanating from it; sweet and cloying, like incense; it lingered in the throat and made Snape think of smoky fingers reaching into his mouth and around his neck.

"This," Lucius went on, "is where we brew potions that the Ministry, in its cowardice, has banned. The Dark Lord is anxious that we do not lose all this magical knowledge simply because the government finds it threatening. He believes that wizards should be free to perform whatever form of magic they please. It is their birth-right, after all."

Lucius knew exactly how to interest him. He had soon come to the conclusion that Severus Snape was an academic; he didn't care about politics. To him, all magic was beautiful, whatever use it might be put to, and the idea that some spells should be forgotten, simply because people might get hurt, was a horrific one to him.

Lucius didn't turn into the smoky room, but continued up the corridor. The second room they reached was crowded with witches and wizards, all of them shouting and screeching, most of them waving their hands in the air. Snape couldn't see what the room contained, because there were too many figures blocking his view, but he could hear dull, sickening thuds through all the screeching.

"Muggle-baiting," Lucius explained. "Not pretty. And I've just had my dinner, so I think we'll skip that room."

He continued up the corridor, and Severus hastened to keep up.

"What's muggle-baiting?" he asked eagerly.

"It is a sport," Lucius replied, "far more sophisticated than Quidditch. Two wizards duel by each putting a Muggle under the Imperius Curse and making them fight to the death. Far more civilized than harming a fellow wizard. And it sharpens the mind. Trains a wizard in exerting his magical influence over the weak-willed. That, as the Dark Lord has often said, is the only skill essential to our success."

The corridor ended abruptly with an oak-panelled doorway, almost indistinguishable from the walls on either side. In the dim light, Snape could only just make out the hinges.

"What's in here?" he asked.

"Would you like to see?" Lucius asked, smiling in a conspiratorial way. "This is what I brought you here for."

He twirled his wand in a complicated pattern, and the door opened. Snape felt a brief sense of anticlimax when he realised that the only thing in this room was a dark row of bookshelves, but this was replaced by a heady, swooping sense of excitement when he realised what kind of books these were.

"Mind magic," said Lucius Malfoy. "That is what fascinates you, is it not? Dumbledore keeps no books on that subject, not even in the Restricted Section (which, incidentally, is the most extraordinary hypocrisy, because I know he practises Legilimency himself). But here you may learn the art of penetrating the mind - stealing memories, extracting information, controlling behaviour." He laid a delicate stress on the last two words, and lifted one of his almost-invisible eyebrows. "That is the essence of all magic - a battle of wills. And the two things that enable a wizard to succeed in this are imagination and resolution, both of which you have in excess. You will be a very useful servant to the Dark Lord someday."

Snape, who had been eagerly examining a black leather book with polished bones embossed on the spine, suddenly looked up at him. His mouth was taut with suppressed enthusiasm, and he was breathing hard through his nostrils. He looked exultant, but there was still something doubtful about the look he directed at Lucius Malfoy. Malfoy decided not to press him.

"Someday," he repeated, with a smile. "For now, you're free to come here whenever you like, to read, brew potions or practise muggle-baiting. There is a whole world of magic that has been kept from you, Severus. Dumbledore and the Ministry have kept you from achieving your full potential because they fear it. And well they should."

Lucius Malfoy was not as clever as Snape, but he was observant. He might sneer at the majority of the people he met, but he understood them; he knew what motivated them, because he had so frequently bribed, cajoled or bullied them in order to get his way. In fact, this understanding was especially necessary with clever people, because Malfoy knew how useful they could be, and how inconvenient they could make themselves if they were not under his control.

He recognised Snape's desire to be feared and respected. He had a sadistic streak, and a wonderful steadfast resolution - very characteristic of Slytherins - which meant that he wasn't troubled by squeamishness or social taboos; there was literally nothing that he wouldn't do to get what he wanted. Unfortunately for Lucius, this particular characteristic of Snape's was going to get him poisoned.

They made their way back to the bar of the Hanged Man, and sat down under the smoky rafters, watching the trembling barman as he poured and spilled every drink. Severus, his mind still swimming with potion-fumes and books bound in dragon-hide, offered to buy Malfoy a drink. A stupid gesture, because Malfoy was obscenely rich and Severus only had enough money for one-and-a-half butter-beers. But it was a stupid gesture that Malfoy seemed to appreciate – perhaps because he knew that you didn't retain friends by boasting about your obscene wealth every five minutes.

Dragging his feet with reluctance, Severus made his way up to the bar. This was the moment he couldn't put off any longer. He somehow had to slip the Amortentia into Malfoy's drink. And, after seeing the interior of the Hanged Man, Lucius Malfoy seemed like a terrifyingly well-protected figure. He was at the centre of a circle of wealth and privilege; he had access to incredibly rare books on mind magic, and the Dark Lord had made him one of his lieutenants. The idea that he wouldn't notice a rare potion being slipped into his drink was ludicrous.

But he would never beat Potter if he wasn't prepared to take risks. It didn't matter that the risks were disproportionately huge, because so was his hatred. In a way, it didn't even matter if he was caught, so long as Narcissa still got the Dark Snitch into Potter's hands – so long as something agonizing and humiliating still happened to that grinning bastard.

He had reached a stage of such advanced, deep-seated hatred that he was prepared to risk everything to hurt Potter. He would _open a vein_ to hurt Potter – just so that, for once in his spoilt, pampered, sickening life, Potter would know what it felt like to _lose_ something.

The barman obligingly turned away – perhaps because eye-contact increased his tremblings – and Severus uncorked the potion bottle he'd been carrying in his pocket.

He only needed a tiny amount. This stuff was more virulent than any poison. It was virulent before it even touched your lips – it could make your heart rise in your throat from ten feet away – because it smelled of everything you associated with love. Severus kept his hand determinedly steady as he breathed in the orange-spice scent of Lily's shampoo. It only made him more determined.

He poured the contents of the bottle into Malfoy's butter-beer, and brought the tray of drinks back to the table. Malfoy was examining his own reflection in the polished silver knob on top of his cane. "When you see Narcissa," he said, picking up the glass and letting it hover casually by his lips, "tell her that it would never have worked."

Snape knew how to suppress his anxiety. He'd been doing it since he was four years old. "Why wouldn't it have worked?" he asked calmly.

Lucius - grave, dignified, serious Lucius - actually seemed agitated by this question. "She is too good for me," he said. "She needs somebody who will be hers to command."

Snape raised his eyebrows. "No argument there. But I still don't see why that can't be you."

"She believes in things," Lucius was tapping his cane on the table-top now, with an agitation that seemed a million miles from his usual calm, sneering persona. For the first time – and with a soaring but suppressed sense of relief – Severus realized how preoccupied Malfoy was. He seemed to be obsessed with Narcissa Black _already._

Actually, that probably wasn't good. He didn't know what the Amortentia would do to someone who was _already_ in love.

"I do not wish to spoil her," Malfoy continued, in an approximation of a dignified voice. "She is innocent and idealistic."

Snape was too much in awe of Malfoy to contradict him, even with a mistake as blatant as this one. It seemed that sleeping with her sister had been Malfoy's way of telling Narcissa that he admired her.

"Well, she's young," he managed. "Everyone gets spoiled eventually."

"No-one's going to spoil Narcissa Black if they don't want to be hung up by their entrails over a cage of ravenous werewolves," Lucius growled.

Snape wasn't sure what to say to this, so he kept silent.

"Just tell her it would never have worked," Lucius added irritably.

"Shall I tell her the bit about the werewolves?"

At first, Snape was afraid he'd gone too far, but then the familiar sneering smile lit up Malfoy's face, and he said. "I would not wish to spoil the surprise for her." He gave another dignified sniff and downed his butter-beer in one gulp. "Come back anytime you wish, Severus, day or night. The bar-tender is always awake."

Snape smiled back, feeling slightly dizzy. He suspected that, by the same tortured logic which made Malfoy think that sleeping with Narcissa's sister was a compliment, Narcissa might think that feeding her prospective boyfriends to werewolves was a very romantic thing for Lucius to do.

Still, he had drunk the Amortentia, so he was only going to get crazier from here. Severus was half-curious to see how the symptoms would manifest themselves, and half-desperate to be somewhere else when they did.

He downed his own butter-beer – there had only been enough money for half a butter-beer, in any case – and told Lucius that he had to get back to school.


	11. Chapter 11: Desconfianza

Narcissa didn't like having to play dumb. Still, it was sometimes necessary. Men needed to be convinced of their own superiority – or at least their own worth – before they would propose marriage. It was no good captivating a man with your charms if he was then going to moon about hopelessly, agonizing over the fact that you were too good for him. You had to tone down your own intelligence if you wanted to be thought of as a suitable prospective bride.

Narcissa's ancestors had been wonderful at this. Her great-aunt Lavinia had successfully convinced her own husband for twenty years that she was an innocuous half-wit. He was probably still under that impression when he was lying on the living-room carpet, dying of arsenic poisoning. A nasty way to die, but not one which afforded you much capacity for rational thought.

Narcissa had liberated the box containing the Dark Snitch from her family vault that morning. It had been buried under an altar, surrounded by ominous carvings about deadly curses and avenging angels. As a daughter of the House of Black, she naturally understood that these warnings didn't apply to her.

And now she was standing in front of Madam Hooch's locker, listening to the sounds of male, moronic gooning from the Quidditch-changing-rooms next door, and wondering why Potter wouldn't hurry up and _discover_ her already.

Severus was right about the intelligence-dampening effects of the boy's ego. It had been a good Quidditch practice. Narcissa had watched it from the stands – wondering all the time why the ability to zoom after a mechanical ball at high speeds was supposed to make you a worthier human being. Potter looked… well, _undignified_, when he was zooming after those things. He looked like he was actually _trying_. His cheeks were red – his untidy hair was flapping about in all directions – he was making very unattractive faces, as though he was lifting dumb-bells or straining on the toilet – and still, his little fan-club of girls were down on the pitch, swooning at this formidable display of effort.

Narcissa had never found effort attractive. She would have had incredibly low self-esteem if she did.

So now Potter, validated by all that attention, was behaving very incautiously. She was sure she had slammed the door when she came into the Quidditch-rooms, but no-one – not even their little servant Pettigrew – had come out to investigate her presence. Perhaps it was time to forego the subtleties.

She dropped the rosewood box onto the floor, watching it bring up clouds of dust, and cursed as loud as she could.

Well, Potter might be over-confident, but he _was_ fast. He was standing in the doorway of the changing-rooms within a few seconds, leaning against the door-frame and looking smug.

Narcissa managed to stare at him. It was all she could do not to sigh.

"What are you up to, 'Cissy?" he asked, as Sirius, Lupin and Pettigrew poked their heads round the doorframe behind him.

Narcissa flinched at the annoying nick-name, but didn't rise to it. "I…" she stammered. "I was… I was looking for Sirius."

"Oh, yeah?" said Sirius, swaggering out of the changing rooms with fury in his eyes. He always got that look whenever he was confronted with reminders of his family. "What about? And what have you got there?" His eyes flicked down to the rosewood box which was lying, prone but fortunately not open, at her feet. "Wormtail, pick it up."

Wormtail, his face shining with eager or apprehensive sweat, did as he was told. He passed it to Sirius, and Sirius turned it over in his hands. Narcissa waited until he had almost undone the clasp, and then hissed: "_Don't_!"

Sirius raised his eyebrows, and examined the front of the box in more detail.

"Hey, I know what this is!" he said, turning triumphantly to Potter. "This is in our family vault. It's got the crest of Ulysses Santacruz on the lid."

There was a shocked silence. Everyone, it seemed, had heard of Ulysses Santacruz, and his most treasured, never-possessed, possession.

Narcissa saw them taking in her position by Madam Hooch's locker. Thank heavens she wouldn't have to do any more guilty stammering.

"I reckon your cousin was trying to plant something nasty in Madam Hooch's locker, Padfoot," said Potter slowly. "Now why would a nice girl like her want to do a mean thing like that?"

Narcissa simply raised her eyebrows. Now, she judged, would probably be the right time to find her courage. "You can't prove anything," she said. "I was here with one of _my family's_ possessions. It doesn't concern you, or any other blood-traitor who happens to be in your entourage."

Sirius – never very good at suppressing his emotions – was beside her in two bounds, pinning her wrists up against the locker. Potter and Lupin were shouting his name, but Sirius ignored them.

"You disgust me," he growled, pressing his face very close to hers. "You and everyone else in that in-bred asylum you call a home."

"The feeling is more than mutual," she replied calmly.

"Padfoot!" said Potter, louder this time. "Let her go. She's only a fifth-year! Regulus probably put her up to it."

There was another growl from Sirius, but he released her, muttering incoherent threats that culminated in the sentence: "Maybe, one day, you Slytherin scum will find you've bitten off more than you can chew."

"_We_ don't bite," said Narcissa, massaging the circulation back into her wrists. "_We're_ not animals."

There was a silence. Potter and Sirius were looking at her with shocked – and then amused – faces. Gradually, the silence turned into laughter. "Well, you're missing out," said Sirius, between snorts. He picked up the rosewood box and dusted it off. "We won't tell Madam Hooch you've been here if you let us keep this box, huh? How's that for a deal, Princess?"

Narcissa smoothed down the creases in her skirt and shrugged. "It's your funeral."

**‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

It was half an hour later, and they still hadn't opened the box. They were all aware of how restrained they were being, and three of them were adament that this entitled them to some kind of Dark-Snitch-based reward.

James, Sirius, Lupin and Pettigrew were sitting in front of the fire-place in the Gryffindor common-room. The rosewood box containing the Dark Snitch had been placed reverentially on the carpet, where it was juddering from time to time, and making Pettigrew jump.

They clustered around and watched it. James and Sirius knew how to loll properly; they were both stretched out luxuriantly on the carpet. Pettigrew was standing up through sheer excitement, shifting his weight from foot to foot, but Lupin was sitting in an arm-chair, his back ramrod straight, his fingers tapping restlessly on the front cover of his library book. James could tell he was preparing to voice some kind of objection, or take some kind of stand, so he attempted to forestall it with his usual bright-eyed enthusiasm.

"My dad told me about Ulysses Santacruz when I got my first broomstick," he said, into the reverential silence which had descended around the rosewood box. "He said no-one these days knows what he looks like, because, in every photograph of him, he's whizzing around like a bluebottle. I can't believe we found his snitch!"

"People would be talking about it for ages," said Sirius thoughtfully. "There isn't a Quidditch team in the country who wouldn't sign you on the spot if you managed to catch the Dark Snitch."

"I think it's dangerous," said Lupin at last, keeping his eyes fixed on the front cover of his library book. "It's called the _Dark_ Snitch, after all. Has it ever occurred to you that it could be dark magic?"

Sirius rolled his eyes. "It's Quidditch, mate. Quidditch is _beyond_ good and evil."

"You don't say that when the Slytherins cheat," said Lupin grimly. "What about the time Avery used that Severance Curse to split Boyd's broomstick in half down the middle, and the different pieces tried to go off in different directions, until he was doing the splits in mid-air fifty feet off the ground?"

James and Sirius shared a sheepish look. If Boyd had been a Slytherin, they would have found that particular stunt hilarious. Since he was a Gryffindor, it was, of course, an outrage.

Sirius was the first to speak. "Well, obviously, if you're a git, you can still get caught up in dark magic on the Quidditch pitch. But Prongs here _isn't_ a git." He patted James on the shoulder, and then added diplomatically: "Not the regular kind, anyway."

"I don't think the Dark Snitch cares how good your intentions are," said Lupin. "The last time it was released, all the spectators had their memories wiped clear and were instantaneously transported to Paris."

"Free holiday!" Sirius protested, with a wave of his arm.

Lupin didn't respond. Automatically, all eyes swiveled in James's direction, as they usually did when there was an argument. Lupin and Pettigrew were too timid to be the final arbitrators, and Sirius – although no-one dared admit it – was too cruel. There would be no reconciliations if Sirius was in charge. The four Marauders would have stopped talking to each other long ago, if it hadn't been for James's diplomatic softness. So the final decisions were usually left to him. But it was immediately apparent that he wasn't going to be able to make this one impartially. He was staring at the rosewood box with longing in his eyes.

"Listen, Moony – no, _listen_," he added, as Lupin's face fell. "You don't understand what a _find_ this is!"

"It's dangerous."

"That's what makes it fun!" James protested, laughing. "What's the matter," he went on, spreading his arms wide, "you think I'm not good enough to catch it? Is that it?"

Lupin made a face that was half-frowning and half-amused. "Of course I don't think - ,"

But James interrupted, bowled along by the momentum of his own enthusiasm. "You think I'd let anyone get hurt?"

"I know you wouldn't_ let_ - ,"

"Besides, full moon's _weeks _away, and you know we'll only get into trouble if we don't have some excitement to look forward to."

"Yeah, Moony," said Pettigrew, who felt safe joining in the argument, now that he knew no-one was going to back Lupin up.

"And who knows," said Sirius, slapping James heartily on the back, "maybe if you caught the Dark Snitch, it might even cause that ice-queen Evans to thaw out a little bit."

James coloured slightly, but said nothing. Sirius's voice was pretty loud to begin with, and it would only get louder if he argued. But nobody could have seemed further from an ice-queen to him. Lily Evans was… well, she was like the opposite of Narcissa, with her tidy hair and china-white skin. Lily was all blushes and smiles and motion. She was all _alive_.

Granted, she had strange moods sometimes. She and James were not exactly friends, but he had spent a lot of time watching her, and you'd have to be blind not to notice them. She became strangely withdrawn and insular at certain moments, as though all the loud Gryffindor colours and loud Gryffindor opinions hurt her ears, and she was desperately casting her eyes around for something _different_.

But James wouldn't have liked her half so much if she'd been easy to figure out. Besides, for all her strangeness, there was something so familiar about her. She reminded him of his childhood somehow.

The warm glow of her hair called to mind spices and red gold. In fact, her hair smelled of oranges and sweet spices: ginger, cinnamon and cloves – a scent that evoked both Christmas and warm, exotic lands - both comfort and excitement. Everything about her suggested adventure to James Potter – and adventure was irresistible to James Potter.

His father had been a curse-breaker for Gringotts, and had once taken James to South America. The place had made an impression on him. He'd seen crumbling temples, choked with vines, brightly coloured macaws, strange new constellations in the sky at night. His father had shown him the horrible magical booby-traps that the South American wizards put in place to secure their fortunes. He'd told him stories about the Desconfianza curse, which struck you down with a fever, and in this fever, you experienced despair (James hadn't known what despair was, so his father had had to explain it): "you can't imagine a future for yourself, and it hurts to remember all the things you love, because they torment you by their absence, and by the certain knowledge that they'll always be absent from you, forever." (James had given a small shudder to hear his father being so serious).

"The only way to counter this curse," George Potter had explained, "is to think about the good things, the things you love: just _them_: not how you'll see them again, nothing like that, because reason isn't on your side; reason belongs to the fever. Just picture them in your mind's eye, just cling to them, even while the fever is telling you they're gone, useless, tainted, unreachable. And don't let go of them. It's not hope you need, just stubbornness."

James had listened, wide-eyed. He had goose-bumps at the thought of his father being struck down by despair, being vulnerable. "What happened?" he breathed. "Did the curse lift?"

"After three or four days of struggle," George said grimly. "But I wouldn't let go of you or your mother. And, as she would tell you, stubbornness is not something I'm short on."

James had been struck by this. His father was strong and quick-witted and had never seemed to need anyone else. It was confusing to think that in a desperate situation he had been saved by the thought, just the _thought_, of James and his mother.

"You shouldn't be afraid of Dark Magic," George had said, "you should respect it; you should know what it can do; but fear is the principle under which these curses operate. That fever wanted me to feel alone, alienated, paralysed. Have you ever wondered why Dark Magic always involves grisly things like skulls, blood, shrunken heads, dead bodies? It's because these are the things that people fear. And fear is a powerful basis for magic. If you can govern your fear, I don't say you'll be immune to Dark Magic, but you'll be able to see it for what it is: you'll be able to see that it's vulnerable; that it, like everything else, has its weaknesses." At this point, George Potter had smiled slightly. "Mind, I don't say that confidence can't cloud your vision just as much as fear. But you'll learn, James, to govern one as well as the other. You're smarter than me, after all. Got your mother's logic."

Some parts of this speech had made a stronger impression on James than others. He had wholeheartedly absorbed the notion that he was clever, that fear was not to be bothered with, that Dark Magic was disgusting, dishonourable trickery. But he had never been able to understand why confidence could make you just as vulnerable as fear. In fact, it would only be after he released Ulysses Santacruz's Dark Snitch that he would begin to understand _that_ part of his father's speech.

Lily Evans reminded him of South America, but he couldn't immediately understand why. It was something more than the glow of adventure she inspired. It was something to do with his father's story about the Desconfianza fever. He couldn't understand it, so he continued to think of her jewel-bright hair and exotic scent as the explanation for the connection. If there was more, he would work it out eventually; he always did.

**‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

Four floors below, in a store-room off the main Potions-dungeon, Severus Snape kneeled by the unlit hearth, listening to the echoes of loathsome Gryffindor voices as they petered out. After eavesdropping on Potter and his cronies this way, he always felt badly in need of a bath.

The castle, though built of solid granite, with walls that could be five inches thick in places, was much more porous than its students realized. Any building with that many fireplaces needed a lot of ventilation. The entire place was honey-combed with chimney shafts and ventilation grilles. If you had intelligence, patience, and a lot of time on your hands – and, needless to say, Severus Snape had all three – you could work out, for example, which fireplaces shared a chimney-shaft with the fireplace in the Gryffindor common-room. Severus didn't have a magic map that showed him every floor of the castle, but he was incredibly good at visualizing structures in his head, and listening out for the tell-tale harmonics of his enemies' voices.

Potter and his cronies always clustered round the fire, because those were the best seats. They probably sweated like pigs next to the roaring flames, but they would only sit in the best seats. It was a moronic matter of pride.

And they never bothered to lower their voices. After all, they were iworshipped/i among their fellow Gryffindors. Who would dare to tell on them? Potter had won the House Cup for Gryffindor _four years running_.

Besides, their inveterate hatred for Slytherins had given them the converse impression that everyone the Sorting Hat placed in Gryffindor must be a 'decent bloke'. They were going to be _ripped apart_ when they got out into the real world.

But Severus couldn't wait that long.

He spent so much time eavesdropping on them that many people would have been surprised to learn that he could go on hating them as much as he did. But he did.

Every flash of thoughtfulness or consideration displayed by Potter towards his friends was just more proof of the bastard's hypocrisy. He would treat you with respect if you were a _Gryffindor_ – if you were prepared to worship him, flatter him, and let him have his own way.

Or – and this was beginning to rattle him more and more – if you were a pretty girl.

Potter only ever received insults from Lily Evans, but he still fawned on her. His bragging still got louder whenever she approached, and trailed off into sheepish mumblings when she walked away with her nose in the air.

It would have been funny if it hadn't been Lily.

But Potter always got what he wanted. Everyone knew that. How long could Lily go on refusing a rich pure-blood who was adored by the whole bloody school?

Well, in a sense, that was the point of the Dark Snitch. Maybe the school wouldn't adore him so much if they knew how casually he was willing to put them all in danger. Or maybe – better still – he would get horribly disfigured, or driven out of what could charitably be called his wits through sheer terror.

If there was any justice, it would be both.

That had been the idea originally, but Severus had lost hold of the point somewhere along the way. He couldn't imagine any future after he'd taken his revenge on Potter. It was as though his entire life had been building up to this one do-or-die, all-resolving point, and whatever resulted from Potter's agony was just a footnote on the final page of history.

And you couldn't avert it any more than you could hold back a tidal wave with your hands. The spring was wound up tight. Potter had been twisting it for six years, with his idle hexes and casual insults. It was going to uncoil itself. That was a physical inevitability. Every action had an equal and opposite reaction.

In fact, it seemed so inevitable to Severus that he began to wonder why Dumbledore hadn't _planned_ for this.

Perhaps he had. Perhaps there would be no vengeance tomorrow – just a grave, twinkly-eyed old man, tapping his fingers against the rosewood box which contained the Dark Snitch, looking disappointed.

And that was the worst part of it. Dumbledore had been prejudiced against him from the moment he'd stepped off the Hogwarts Express six years ago; he had looked on indulgently while Severus was shoved, tripped, hexed and generally battered by the Gryffindors; and yet somehow, whenever Severus broke the rules to get even, he still contrived to look disappointed.

No, that wasn't the worst part. The whole was much greater than the sum of its worst parts. It culminated in the moment when Severus walked out of Dumbledore's office, having received a punishment ten times more severe than the punishment James Potter received for the original act of malice that had incited all this, and _he felt guilty, because Dumbledore was disappointed in him_.

Severus was good at blaming other people for his misfortunes, but there was really nothing he could do to avoid hating himself in moments like that. He was just as stupid with Dumbledore as he was with Lily Evans. He knew they both hated him – he knew they preferred loud, brash, arrogant idiots – and yet somehow, incredibly, he still wanted them on his side.

What with all that, it was hard to see beyond tomorrow. It was painful to think of anything beyond the immediate present anyway. Severus's horizons had been narrowed by sheer hatred. Lily was lost to him forever. Both the future and the past were painful to contemplate. So, instead, he thought about Potter's pain. If there was to be no future, there could at least be _satisfaction_. It was the least the universe owed him.


	12. Chapter 12 Flesh Wounds & Flesh Memories

That night – and not for the first time – James Potter dreamt about flying. He dreamt about clouds getting snagged on his toes and trailing after him like brambles. He dreamt about clear, forget-me-not-blue skies and sheer drops without fear. He woke up a few times, tingling with anticipation for the coming dawn, while Padfoot snored loudly in the next bed. He paced around for a while, deliberately creaking the floor-boards in the hope that one of his friends might wake up and provide him with some company, but they slumbered on, oblivious.

James was never troubled with nerves before a Quidditch match – only impatience. He wanted to be up there in the sky, instead of having to come up with threatening taunts for the Slytherin Quidditch-team, or suffering the indignity of having people pat him on the back and assure him that he would be brilliant, as if there was some kind of _doubt_ in their minds.

Tomorrow would be the adventure of a life-time, and he couldn't wait to get started. Dreamily, he ran possible team strategies and flying formations through his head. He would have to wear thick gloves, because he'd heard that the Dark Snitch released a paralysing potion whenever someone touched it. It would have other defences too, so he'd tucked his Antidotes Kit – only seven Galleons from Quality Quidditch Supplies, "The perfect piece of kit for the magical adventurer on the go" – into the breast-pocket of the T-shirt he wore under his Quidditch robes. He'd be taking his wand too, of course. That went without saying. He didn't know how long he'd be gone, but he wasn't going to come back without the Dark Snitch.

The day, when it finally dawned, turned out to be hot, muggy and overcast. There was something crackling and oppressive about the atmosphere. It was as though the clouds were gathering together, pooling their resources, in order to throw everything they'd got into the coming thunderstorm. James half-hoped it would break during the Quidditch match, for extra drama.

He got through the rest of the morning on automatic, smiling and scowling at people based on the colour of their school-tie, and putting his Quidditch robes on back-to-front when he finally reached the changing-rooms. He probably would have walked onto the pitch like that, if it hadn't been for Boyd. Boyd was a third-year, hoping to become Quidditch Captain when James eventually left school, and consequently very keen that the team should be well-turned-out. Back-to-front robes, he said, would be unlikely to impress Dumbledore.

James mumbled that he had _already_ impressed Dumbledore by winning four Quidditch Cups, and went back to change again.

By the time he got onto the pitch, he was completely numb with excitement. He hadn't felt this way since his first match. The crowd was a nervous blur before his eyes – just a writhing mass of shouts and colours. He held his breath as Madam Hooch, with her whistle between her lips, kicked open the box containing the Quidditch balls.

It rose out of the open box, straight up, like a piece of debris from some earth-shattering explosion. A gasp emerged from the crowd at the same time – the familiar collective intake of breath before the whistle blew on a Hogwarts Quidditch-match – but it lagged hopelessly behind the Dark Snitch. Still, James felt it wash over his skin, raising goose-bumps along the way.

The Snitch was lost to sight for a while – and _still_ Madam Hooch hadn't blown the whistle – but it flitted back down again, as though wondering why nobody had started the pursuit.

It was beautiful, that was the first thing you noticed: made of black steel, with raven-feather wings, perfectly curved. Its wing-feathers lay sleek and straight and declared emphatically that they'd never been messed-up by human hands. It was remote and unconquered. James felt as though he was standing on the shores of a new world.

It passed within three feet of his head, and he had to work hard to stifle a moan of longing. He couldn't start before the whistle blew, even though every muscle and nerve was straining against its moorings, desperate to begin the chase. The adrenaline had kicked in, as it always did at the start of a Quidditch match – blurring his vision for a second, before smoothing the world out into a panorama of bewitching clarity.

When the whistle finally cut through the air, it sounded faint and far-away. But James didn't dwell on that. He was too busy leaping into the air, hardly caring if his broomstick was beneath him.

His thoughts were rocketing through his head at speed; everything else seemed sluggish by comparison. He could discern every beat of his heart – every beat of the Snitch's wings – but, somehow – maddeningly – he couldn't get any closer to it, no matter how his thoughts raced and his body glided through the unresisting air.

He started to lose all consciousness of the crowd below. Their gasping, cheering and jeering – which had once powered every loop and dive – was starting to drop back. Perhaps he was flying out of the Quidditch stadium. Or perhaps he had finally learned to tune out the irrelevant things in life. He couldn't believe he'd once cared about winning House Cups, or getting even with the Slytherins, or wondering who Lily Evans was currently dating. All of that was wonderfully distant now. The only thing that existed for him was the dark glittering of the snitch. It filled his whole field of vision – even though it was just a miniscule point on the horizon, getting no closer, but guiding his broom like the north-star, steering him back on course.

After an indeterminate amount of time – it seemed like seconds, but it could have been hours, because time flew when you were having fun and it _rocketed_ when you were transfixed by the Dark Snitch – he saw it slowing down, dropping back, as though it wanted to make sure it still had his attention.

Potter urged his broomstick forward and stretched out his hand. He could feel the manic black wings beating against his gloves. But, after three beats, he started to smell smoking leather and feel a brief, tingling coldness where his hand had been exposed to the air. After that, all feeling in his arm evaporated. He tried to tell his fingers to close around the Snitch – it was within his grasp, for God's sake! – but they wouldn't listen. His whole arm sagged and hung limply by his side. James felt it over-balancing the broom, and adjusted his trajectory to compensate.

He'd forgotten about the paralyzing potion. Well, it was no problem. He could catch a Snitch left-handed any day. He'd even once had to catch one in his teeth, that time when a Bludger had broken his left arm, and he'd been holding Boyd off the ground with his right. Man, he'd been a hero in the Gryffindor common-room _that_ night!

He followed it under the dark branches of the Forbidden Forest, gliding between the trees with split-second ease. Always, it remained just ahead of him – not so far that he couldn't dream of catching up, but getting no closer, no matter how he accelerated or flattened himself against the broom-handle.

He chased it into a clearing, carpeted with grass spangled with little white flowers. James, who only had eyes for the Dark Snitch, was slightly disoriented to see unexpected colours in his peripheral vision – a kind of dark, distracting red, which looked out of place amidst all the black and brown. Even weirder, he could hear_ humming_.

For a sole, stupid moment, he took his eyes off the Dark Snitch. But a sole, stupid moment is all it takes in Quidditch, especially when your quarry has been souped-up with added magical powers.

He saw a girl in the clearing, bending down to pick the white flowers, and then everything came to a shuddering halt. It didn't hurt, because the entire right-half of his body was numb by now, but he had the definite impression that it was going to hurt tomorrow, when the paralyzing potion wore off. He'd caught his helpless, limp right arm in a crook between two branches, and his broomstick had clattered to the ground – which was at least twenty feet away. James was hanging from the tree by a limb he couldn't even feel.

And, to make matters worse, he realized, as his eyes searched desperately for the Dark Snitch, that the girl in the clearing was Lily.

She hadn't noticed him. She was immersed in her flower-picking and her humming. Dimly, James realized that the white, star-shaped blooms in the clearing were Dittany flowers, and that she must have been harvesting the pods for healing potions. A stream of potion-statistics – relics of last year's intensive OWLS revision – streamed into his head, but he shook himself, trying desperately to relocate the Dark Snitch.

It hadn't zoomed off. It was just hovering a few inches above Lily's shoulder, perhaps wondering why she wasn't gasping and trying to snatch it out of the air.

Gently, it lowered itself onto her. For a few seconds, she didn't even seem to notice, and then she must have felt the stirring motion of its wings, because she turned her head very slowly, as though she was expecting to see something horrible climbing up her arm, and blinked in puzzlement.

She looked around, obviously wondering if she had wandered into the midst of a Quidditch game, and that was when she saw Potter hanging, bloody and bruised, from the tree at the edge of the clearing. Her mouth formed itself into a perfect 'O'. Potter's mouth reciprocated, because he was looking at her left shoulder, where the Dark Snitch's paralyzing potion was burning away her school-shirt.

For a moment, neither of them moved, and then, dreamily, as though he was doing nothing more extraordinary than untying his shoelaces, James cast a Severance Charm in order to cut his own arm off.

And that was the last thing he knew.

‹**×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

The Hospital Wing was bustling. There had been outbreaks of green fire in the stands of the Quidditch stadium. This, it turned out, was a paralyzing fire, which didn't burn but froze you, motionless, inside your own body. There were at least fifty people crammed into the beds in the Hospital Wing. Madam Pomfrey was in a terrible mood.

"Unforgivably irresponsible!" she shouted, as she dabbed potions fiercely onto random student limbs.

"Are you talking about me, or the students?" Dumbledore asked politely. He was sitting – very emphatically out of Madam Pomfrey's way – in an armchair which had been positioned outside the door to her office, reading a magazine.

"Everybody!" she snapped. "You're not exempt from it, Dumbledore, believe me! When you get students this stupid, it's irresponsible to even let them out of the castle! You should keep them under lock and key, for their own safety!"

"We don't know who replaced the snitch with Ulysses Santacruz's Dark Snitch," Dumbledore replied gently. "There may have been only one stupid student. Perhaps one who didn't even realize what he or she was doing. It would be unkind to keep them all locked up because of one student's mistake, Poppy."

He gestured at the unconscious form in the bed nearest to him. "There, for example, is the delightful Margot Holloway, who has never cost Slytherin House so much as a point in her entire school career – who thinks the Death Eaters should carry out controlled scientific experiments before they make any rash pronouncements about superior and inferior blood-lines. Surely you can't be suggesting we should place her in the same category of irresponsibility as a James Potter or a Sirius Black?"

Madam Pomfrey dropped into a chair beside him, massaging her temples. "You are aware that we could be sitting here with fifty dead bodies, instead of fifty injured Quidditch-fans?"

Dumbledore's smile faded. "I am aware we have been exceptionally fortunate, yes."

"_Who's responsible_?"

"I shall endeavor to find out."

"You know what I think?"

Dumbledore coughed delicately. "My dear Poppy, you're seldom shy about it."

She ignored that. "I think Potter wanted to impress us all by catching the legendary Dark Snitch in front of a large audience."

"I imagine that is what the rest of the school will think too."

"They don't seem to mind much!" Madam Pomfrey exclaimed. "I caught six first-years trying to sneak in here earlier with a box of chocolate frogs for him! I mean, where does a first-year even get hold of a box of chocolate frogs at short notice? They're not allowed to visit Hogsmeade."

Dumbledore put down the magazine and leaned closer. "You know, I'm not supposed to know about it, but there's a thriving trade in Honeydukes and Zonko-products within this school, and what it thrives on is the naivety of the younger students. Did you know that a first-year will pay up to a Galleon for a two-Sickle packet of Drooble's Best Blowing Gum, just because it comes from Hogsmeade? I really must put a stop to it sometime – although, I confess, the logistics of such a mammoth operation are somewhat daunting."

Madam Pomfrey's irritable attention had wandered back to Potter. "He was extremely lucky he didn't succeed in cutting his arm off, you know," she mused. "If Lily hadn't Stunned him when she did…"

"I know."

"Another second and she wouldn't have been able to! The paralyzing potion would have prevented her."

"I know."

"And I expect she had second thoughts about saving him in the first place!"

"Second thoughts in the first place?" Dumbledore enquired politely.

"You know what I mean."

"My dear Poppy, if you are trying to extract compliments from me, you shall not find me wanting. Your protégée acted commendably, and I intend to tell her so as soon as she comes round."

Madam Pomfrey, slightly mollified, lapsed into silence, while Dumbledore glanced around the room. "I see you have yielded to the temptation of separating the injured Gryffindors from the injured Slytherins," he observed.

Madam Pomfrey smiled sweetly. "It's my job to preserve their health, Dumbledore; it's _your_ job to educate them."

Dumbledore chuckled. It wasn't the first time Madam Pomfrey had been led to suspect that he enjoyed being insulted.

‹**×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

Severus loitered in the anteroom outside the Hospital Wing. He had been loitering there for most of the afternoon, standing, seething and unseen, in the shadows, while hysterical visitors rushed to pay tribute to their dim-witted hero and were shooed away by an irate Madam Pomfrey.

If only he'd been too miserable to think! But Severus was never too miserable to think. Misery and thought went hand in hand for him, and the one would always encourage the other.

It had been satisfying, in a surreal way, to see Potter brought in on a stretcher, covered in blood. It had been tantalizing to hear the whispers of the crowd outside the Hospital Wing, while they swapped rumours and reports. Was their beloved Potter responsible for all this chaos? Had he put everyone in danger just to boost his own ego? Had he really been unable to catch the Dark Snitch?

Severus felt as though satisfaction had been circling him from above like a carrion-bird, waiting for its moment to descend. But the moment had never come. Satisfaction hadn't just been chased away – it had been shot out of the sky with a violent squawk, because Lily had been brought in on the next stretcher, looking pale and startlingly still.

The whisperers said the Snitch had actually _landed_ on her. They said Dumbledore was worried she'd been corrupted by dark magic. Some of them even said it stood to reason that, as a muggle-born, she would have a lower resistance to dark magic than everyone else.

Severus knew better than to give any credence to what they said. Unfortunately, his own informed speculations were even more alarming, and there was no way to shut them out. The Dark Snitch was a very… unpredictable object. Only one person had ever touched it before, and he'd died immediately afterwards. Granted, he'd been riddled with arrows at the time, so death couldn't have been very far off, but that was even worse. Everyone knew you should keep dying people away from powerfully magical objects. Their last breath was so often a curse, and the kinds of curses that cost the caster his last ounce of strength were _potent_.

On top of everything else, after a few hours, when it became apparent that nobody was going to die, the whispers started to take on an altogether more jovial quality.

What a character that Potter was! He'd try _anything_! Bringing Ulyssez Santacruz's Dark Snitch into a school Quidditch game! People would be talking about this one for years! He deserved a medal just for the _cheek_ of it!

Worse than that, they started to hope that he would make a full recovery before the next Quidditch match of the term. It was _his fault_, and they were still concerned for him! He had put them all in danger, and they were queuing up outside the Hospital Wing to pat him on the back!

Not Lily, though. That was something. She was sitting up in her bed in the Hospital Wing, hiding her face behind a copy of Witch Weekly, or pretending to be asleep, whenever Potter glanced over at her.

And he was sickened by the way he clung to that – by the way the world would offer him pitiful consolations and _he would accept them_.

Severus didn't understand it. The more Potter tried to get away with, the more they loved him. They more trouble he got into, the more they trusted him.

His one, dim, final hope was that Dumbledore would come to his senses and expel the bastard, but there didn't seem to be much likelihood of that. Dumbledore loved Potter, and what he did. It was as though he thought that a certain amount of bullying and chaos added _character_ to a school.

Severus felt as though the universe was persecuting him. It wasn't even that the world was meaningless, chaotic and unfair. He hadn't been without an inkling of _that_. It was that the powers of the world seemed to be allied against him, bent on his destruction, on a level so fundamental that they didn't even _realize_ it.

If the world was just indifferent, he could have endured it: but the world was actively hostile. And, in a situation like that, turn-about was fair play. He had to learn how to fight back, how to rely on himself, since no-one else could be relied upon.

The world had already made up its mind about James Potter. And he was beginning to realize – in a slow, creeping sickening way – that it had also made up its mind about Severus Snape. It didn't matter what he tried to do, or how he tried to do it. He would always be the bad guy. Somehow, without meaning to, he'd acquired all the narrative trappings of a villain. He skulked around in the shadows. He was pale, isolated and ugly. He would always end up hurting, disgusting and alienating Lily, because she and the rest of the world had decided that they were on different sides. There was no way across that divide, not while Potter and Dumbledore were still living.

He felt so abandoned that it went beyond anger. He felt as though he was staring uncomprehendingly into the void, and it wasn't even bothering to stare back, because it, too, had dismissed him as a greasy-haired lurker.

He wondered how many dark wizards had been here before him, on this lonely precipice of logic, realizing that the world was against them, and that the only way to lead a full, independent life was to turn against the world. Had even the Dark Lord been here? Handsome, brilliant, popular Tom Riddle? The world hadn't been shy about handing him gifts, but it had never handed him Dumbledore's approval. And, without that, you were the bad guy. You might as well accept it. Roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty, because there was no going back.

‹**×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

"How are you feeling, Lily?"

"Alright," said Lily cautiously, lowering her copy of Witch Weekly. She _didn't_ feel alright, of course, but she had been feeling un-alright for months, so it was probably irrelevant to the present discussion. Besides, Dumbledore and Madam Pomfrey were looking so anxious. She felt duty-bound to soothe their anxieties, even with lies. "Why?" she went on, brushing her hair back. "What _was_ that thing?"

Dumbledore steepled his fingers and peered at her pensively over the top of them. "How much do you know about the history of Quidditch, Lily?"

"Nothing, sir."

Madam Pomfrey grunted approvingly. "That's what I like to see in a Healer," she muttered.

Lily, despite her worries, had to work hard to suppress a smile here. She liked Madam Pomfrey. The matron was brusque, touchy and constantly annoyed, but Lily had learned to love that kind of disposition when she'd first got to know Severus. In fact, she had been seeking out Madam Pomfrey's company more and more in the months since her argument with Severus. She loved Meg and Mary to bits, of course, but they were so… _noisy_. They always displayed and never watched, always exclaimed and never _listened_. In a world without Severus, Madam Pomfrey's office was the only place where Lily could find quiet, and words of more than two syllables.

Lily stiffened, hating herself for that last thought and wondering where it could have come from. Restlessly, she turned her eyes to the place where the Snitch had landed, on her left shoulder. There was no mark – no bruise, scratch or burn – and the tingling was probably only to be expected. In the aftermath of the paralyzing potion, her whole body had been tingling, as feeling crept reluctantly back to her, reminding her of things like hunger, thirst, the stomach-cramps she was getting with her period, and the nagging sting of isolation she'd been nursing for the past few months. It stood to reason that the part of her body which had actually been _touched_ by the Snitch would be the last to lose the tingling sensation.

Dumbledore gave her a reassuring smile. "The Snitch that landed on your shoulder was one engineered by a very famous, very talented Quidditch player one hundred and thirty years ago. His name was Ulyssez Santacruz. He gave the snitch quite brilliant magical defences, such as the paralyzing potion which immobilized you, and the green fire which has hospitalized a large proportion of our students. He hoped it would present him with a challenge worthy of his extraordinary talents. The pursuit of it consumed fifty years of his life, and resulted in his death, so I suppose, in a very extreme fashion, his hopes were fulfilled."

"He never caught it?" said Lily. Madam Pomfrey had been fussing over her while Dumbledore spoke. She now took advantage of his silence to grab Lily's chin and demand that she say 'aaaah'.

"No, he never caught it, in the conventional sense, but I believe it came back to him as he lay dying and settled on his shoulder."

Lily, her mouth still open, stared at him. "Why did it do that?"

"Perhaps, over the years, it had developed some form of relationship with him."

"But Snitches aren't…" she hesitated, while Madam Pomfrey grabbed her wrist and took her pulse. "They're not… conscious?"

"This one was an extraordinary feat of magical engineering, Lily. It may have acquired more of Ulysses Santacruz's personality than even _he_ realized. The point is that, to my knowledge, you and he are the only ones to have touched the Snitch and, since he died immediately afterwards, we were in no position to question _him_ about its effects."

"Well, what kind of effects are you expecting?"

Madam Pomfrey let go of Lily's wrist with a satisfied tut. "I can't see any obvious signs of corruption, Dumbledore."

"_Corruption_?" Lily repeated in alarm.

Dumbledore shrugged cheerfully. "It's just a word, my dear Lily."

"Yes, but it's just a word for something you think I might have!" she protested. "Can't you even tell me what you're looking for?"

"I don't think that would be a good idea, do you?" said Madam Pomfrey briskly, sticking a thermometer in Lily's mouth. "Besides, you're well-acquainted with the library's section on healing magic, Lily, you're quite capable of finding out on your own."

"We don't know very much ourselves, Lily," Dumbledore explained gently. "And, in cases like these, symptoms tend to turn up as soon as the patient knows they're a possibility."

Lily folded her arms and tried to sound disdainful, which is hard to do with a thermometer in your mouth. "You mean you think I'll start imagining things?"

"Nobody's immune to it," Madam Pomfrey cut in, grabbing the thermometer and shaking it impatiently.

"Something that absorbed its maker's personality, and can produce green fire and paralyzing potion," Lily murmured uneasily, "it sounds a lot like... well, like _dark_ magic."

Dumbledore and Madam Pomfrey exchanged a glance. Madam Pomfrey was the first to speak. "And if it _was_, Lily Evans?" she demanded sharply. "What's that to you? Dark Magic can only influence you if you _let_ it. Poison goes where poison's welcome, and it should never be welcome in a Healer's mind."

Dumbledore interrupted her, in soothing, diplomatic tones. "Poppy is trying to say that we think you're more or less immune to corrupting influences, Lily. I assure you, she means it as a compliment."

Lily gave an embarrassed shrug and nodded. "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I know."

They walked off to tend to the other students, and Lily had to bury her face behind her copy of _Witch Weekly _again, because Potter was seeking out her eyes with a kind of determined wretchedness. She did _not_ want to hear any thankyous or apologies just now. And, most of all, she didn't want to hear anything more about Quidditch.

There was a tangle of anxiety in her mind, and she couldn't unknot it, or work out which thread had come from which source. Somehow, the touch of the Dark Snitch was mixed up in her head with her growing loneliness, with the way she missed Severus, with her worries about what he was going to do without her.

And, god, why did she _care_? He'd made it abundantly clear that he didn't care about her – or that he would only care about her when nobody was _watching_. Why couldn't she lose this fear, or reason it away? Why couldn't she shake him off? They had nothing in common, did they? They had always disagreed on everything, hadn't they? Why did she feel as though he'd walked away with a sizeable chunk of her soul?

‹**×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

Sirius came to visit James after dinner, when Madam Pomfrey was finally letting visitors into the Hospital Wing. She couldn't forgo the urge to glare at him suspiciously, but, compared with her attitude earlier in the day, that was practically friendly.

Most of the other students had been allowed to go back to their Common-rooms by then, and, to Potter's combined annoyance and relief, Lily had been amongst them. He didn't like the way he couldn't control himself around her; it was a terrifying echo of the way he hadn't been able to control himself earlier in the day.

"They say I tried to cut my own arm off, Padfoot," he whispered hoarsely, as soon as Sirius was settled into the chair next to his bed, leaning back casually with his arms behind his head.

"So?" said Sirius. "It's not like _that's_ anything new. Let's face it, Prongs, you would have cut your arm off for the House Cup last year. And for the Quidditch World Cup, you'd probably chop off something a lot closer to home."

James blushed. "I would _not_!" he protested.

"Ah," said Sirius, nodding sagely. "Of course. No point winning the Quidditch World Cup if you then can't enjoy the girls you'd get as a result of it. Clever."

"Shut up, Padfoot!" said James, glancing around to make sure Lily hadn't come back and overheard this. "I'm being serious! I can hardly remember anything! Dumbledore said if Evans hadn't stunned me, I'd still be zooming around after that thing, with only one arm, trailing blood all over the countryside!"

Sirius grimaced. "Lovely. I suppose he's still a bit annoyed with you. Did you tell him it was you who swapped the Snitches?"

"I _had_ to. People could have got killed."

"Yeah," sighed Sirius, leaning back in his chair. "I told him I got the Snitch out of my family vault. No sense in getting the little Princess into trouble. I've got about a month's worth of detentions, but they're with Hagrid, so I don't really care. What about you?"

"Same," said James, with a feeble shrug. He was feeling unaccountably sorry for himself, despite the fact that he was clearly lucky not to have been expelled.

"You really can't remember anything?" Padfoot went on.

James made a face. "I can remember what the Dark Snitch looked like. And I can remember it settling on Evans's shoulder and burning away her school-shirt."

"Would've been a crying shame if you'd forgotten _that_."

James twisted his fingers wretchedly. "Think it'll have any effect on her?"

"It might turn her into less of a bitch."

James blushed again. "Shut up, Padfoot! She saved my _life_, Dumbledore said."

"It's not personal," said Sirius, chuckling. "She wants to be a Healer. She probably thought it would get her a placement at St. Mungo's when she leaves school. They're bloody hard to come by, you know."

"I don't care why she did it," said James churlishly.

But that wasn't true. He'd been hoping all afternoon that she'd done it because she'd changed her mind about him. He'd even been telling himself that she was so anxious to avoid eye-contact with him because desire had turned her suddenly shy. The hopes expired every time he thought about what had actually _happened_, though. He couldn't have looked very impressive when he was hanging from a tree, trying to hack his arm off. A girl of a more sensitive disposition would probably vomit every time she looked at him.

He hadn't been being entirely truthful when he'd told Sirius he hardly remembered anything. He remembered the Dark Snitch with such bewitchingly clarity that he was sure it would be turning up in daydreams and nightmares for years to come. It made him ache with hunger and humiliation whenever he thought about it.

And, somehow, Lily was caught up in all that now. Snitches worked by flesh memories. But, by settling on her shoulder, it had imprinted itself on her, not her on it. She became invested with all the desperate mystique of the Dark Snitch. She became something he had to catch, at all costs.

"There you go again," sighed Sirius, as though reading his mind, "going after something just because you can't have it."

"She's not a 'thing'," he said peevishly.

"What would you do if she turned around and said: 'James, I've had the hots for you since first-year. Let's go for it, right here, right now'."

James stared into space for a while. "Is that a trick question?"

"_I'm saying_ you wouldn't like her if she liked you. Just like you wouldn't bother catching a Snitch if it zoomed straight into your hands."

"It would be hard _not_ to catch a snitch if it zoomed straight into my hands," he pointed out. "And, also, you're wrong. I don't enjoy getting rejected, you know. I'm not mental."

"You enjoy getting pelted by bludgers."

"Wrong again!" James protested. "Just because the challenges make you appreciate the prize even more doesn't mean the prize wouldn't be worth anything without the challenges!"

"Doesn't it?"

"No! She's…" he floundered, reddening. "Well, you wouldn't get it."

"Why not?"

"Because you don't have a heart, remember? We established that last Christmas when we went to that muggle cinema to watch 'Love Story', and you spent the whole time laughing."

"Oh yeah," said Sirius, scratching his head. "I'd forgotten about that. Was that supposed to be sad?"

"Ask Wormtail," said James rebelliously. "He was in floods of tears, and you laughed at _that_ too."

Sirius barked with laughter. "Well, don't worry, Prongs. You're further ahead than you were last year. At least now you know she doesn't actually want you dead. And," he added, nodding meaningfully at James's bandaged arm, "chicks love a scar, especially the Healer chicks."

‹**×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

Even after Lily went back to the Gryffindor common-room, Snape had stayed in the ante-room outside the Hospital Wing, staring out of the unglazed window, watching the moon gilding the tops of the fir trees in the Forbidden forest. He told himself he was waiting around to see Potter expelled, but he knew it would never happen. Was he waiting for some modicum of justice to emerge out of this hellish situation? He would be waiting a bloody long time.

There was a delicate cough behind him, and he turned, expecting some fresh torment – maybe Narcissa, demanding to know why Malfoy had not yet arrived at the castle and thrown himself at her feet – or Bellatrix, come to give him what she thought of as a friendly punch on the arm for nearly getting one of Potter's limbs amputated.

But it was only Dumbledore. The fact that Severus didn't immediately recognize this new visitor as a torment was something he was going to rebuke himself for later.

"Shouldn't you be in your common-room, Severus?" he asked gently.

Snape shrugged wordlessly. He wasn't going to give Dumbledore the satisfaction of acting as though he'd been caught out in some way. After all, Sirius Black was out of his common-room, and Dumbledore wasn't breathing disapprovingly down _his_ neck.

"It has been an exciting day, has it not?" Dumbledore went on, joining him by the window, and looking out over the Forbidden Forest.

"Yeah, very exciting," said Snape darkly. "Fifty students nearly dead and Potter not even expelled for it."

Dumbledore's lips curled into a mischievous smile. "If there was definitive evidence that they were behind it - ,"

"If there _was_, you'd hush it up!" Snape shouted. "Like you hushed it up when they tried to _kill_ me!"

"You were not entirely innocent yourself in that instance."

"Was I guilty enough to be disemboweled by a werewolf, Dumbledore?"

Dumbledore's eyes were sparkling. He seemed to be enjoying himself. "I am happy to say that, _then as now_, nobody has died."

"I see," said Severus. "So you only get expelled for murder? _Attempted_ murder is just a slap on the wrist?"

Dumbledore smiled. "Let me endeavour to explain my reasoning to you, Severus. In cases where a little bit of guilt is widely dispersed amongst the student body, I think it best to simply let things be. If I were to expel everyone who was involved in this incident, I would be down at least six excellent students. Therefore, I propose to give everyone a second chance. You can call that favouritism if you like. I prefer to see it as _keeping this castle inhabited_."

He doesn't know anything, Severus told himself, as he glared determinedly back. He's just trying to rattle you. There's no way he could _know_.

But he always suspects the Slytherins, doesn't he? Especially when he can't stand to think that his precious Potter might be to blame.

"I don't understand," he said, trying to keep his voice even. "Hasn't Potter _admitted_ that he switched the Snitches? Didn't Sirius Black admit that he got the Dark Snitch out of his family vault? What kind of _definitive_ evidence are you looking for?"

Dumbledore tapped his long fingers on the window-ledge. "It's a small matter, but I happen to know that the locks on the Black family vault were changed when Sirius ran away from his family home. I am not _supposed_ to know this, so it's very hard for me to confront Sirius with the fact." He turned to Severus, his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm. "And there are other oddities, Severus – things which may be completely unconnected but which should nevertheless give one pause for thought. The theft of some extremely rare ingredients from Professor Slughorn's store-cupboard – ingredients which, he tells me, could be used to make up a cauldron-full of Amortentia. The mysterious indisposition of a friend you went drinking with at the weekend."

"What?" said Snape, his mouth dry.

"Didn't you know Mr. Malfoy was ill?"

"No! What's wrong with him?"

"Nobody can tell. He has barred all doctors from his presence. Another possibly unrelated but potentially thought-provoking fact is that you received an owl half an hour ago." Dumbledore passed him a sealed piece of parchment. "Forgive the idle curiosity, but the crest on the seal is the Malfoy coat of arms, is it not? It seems Mr. Malfoy feels that nobody but you is qualified to be his physician."

Snape set his jaw and took the letter with determinedly steady hands. "For someone who won't expel Potter for a crime he's _admitted_ to, you're strangely eager to leap to conclusions without proof," he said calmly. "Would that have anything to do with the fact that I'm a Slytherin, sir?"

Dumbledore chuckled. He seemed delighted by the cold, composed rebuke.

"Professor Slughorn tells me your recent project on antidotes was exemplary," he said, in a friendly tone of voice. "You are a credit to the school, Severus. I am glad to have you here."

He turned and made a typically Dumbledorean exit, complete with trailing robes and bouncy walk. Severus stared resentfully after him.


	13. Chapter 13: Blue Satin

It was the first bright day of spring. Little furrows of wispy white cloud criss-crossed the pale blue sky, and the smell of wood smoke and petrol fumes mingled under the rooftops of Diagon Alley. Larks looped and threaded their way across this hazy scene.

Equally graceful, but much more dignified, was the girl who walked down the cobble-stoned street beneath them. She sauntered down the steps of Gringotts bank, and glided round the corner into Diagon Alley. Once there, she paused at the window of a jeweller's shop, ostensibly to admire a jewelled dragonfly broche, but her grey eyes soon wandered up to her own reflection, so dazzling in the sunlight that she could still see it when she closed her eyes.

She stared at the window, until she recognized another figure reflected in the glass. He was standing some twenty yards behind her, pretending to examine the window display in Quality Quidditch Supplies. He had been following her all morning.

Narcissa Black was feeling exuberant. This was unusual; her feelings seldom wandered above the level of satisfaction or contentment, because joy was undignified, but today her seemingly-effortless composure was strained. The spring had infected her with a feeling of reckless excitement- she was as close to buoyancy as a girl of her natural laziness could get.

In this state, all kinds of schemes occurred to her. And her favourite topic on which to scheme was husbands.

She had chosen the right one - the best one - but he was wilful and stubborn. She had neglected to show him who was boss.

After all, men could not be allowed to do whatever they wanted, or civilization would collapse. Narcissa had seen her female ancestors stand behind their husbands and sons, pulling strings, persuading, advising, suggesting, controlling, and she assumed that this was what had always happened. Women stood behind powerful men and stopped them from making fools of themselves. Men had the power, but not the sense to make anything of it.

There was no question in her mind that Lucius Malfoy was the best pure-blood wizard for her to marry - he seemed certain, when he had finished tampering with foolish pleasures and hopeless causes, to go into politics. His family was ancient and almost uncorrupted (there had been a Squib cousin in the 1940s, but nobody ever talked about him).

Narcissa didn't want a husband; she wanted a dynasty. There were other ways to get power, but this was the least obtrusive. This was what her ancestors had done, and Narcissa worshipped her clever female ancestors; it was a religion that neatly combined her twin passions of snobbery and narcissism.

From the jeweller's, she made her way up the cobbled street, which was overhung with beamed houses, leaning crookedly to one side or sagging under the weight of centuries. Adhesive charms were the only things keeping these familiar piles of stones together.

Her stalker - a man wearing a dark, hodded robe, which rendered him bizarrely conspicuous in the heavy sunlight - stopped at the jeweller's window to see what she had been looking at. Narcissa slowed her pace a little; she didn't want to disappoint him. When she was confident that he had her in his sights, she stepped into the cool, shady interior of the dress shop.

Its windows were shrouded with elaborate curtains - curtains of stolid velvet, sun-bleached to a soupy grey colour, embroidered with unrecognizable designs, and with heavy tassels that drooped languidly onto the carpet.

Sunlight was peeping through a few chinks, but the curtains were fighting valiantly, as they had done for centuries, to preserve a dignified shade.

Narcissa breathed in the beloved, dusty smell and relished the sudden coolness. She was trying to control the waves of exultation that were crashing over her.

A bell tinkled from a back room behind the counter, and Mr Buntz stepped out.

"Ah, Miss Black!"

"Good morning, Peleus," said Narcissa, with haughty civility. "I would like you to make me a dress."

Peleus Buntz was short and plump. He had a bald head but a sprawling and magnificent moustache, which cast most of his little body into shadow and twitched with enthusiasm whenever he spoke.

When Narcissa Black came into his shop, it positively swayed, like a tree that has been cut down and is only just beginning to realize it. In his experience, she was the perfect customer: she had an unlimited budget, everything looked good on her, and she didn't take up much material.

Peleus Buntz was an artist-turned-businessman. He hadn't wanted to be a tailor, but bitter experience had taught him to be practical. As a young man, he'd dreamed of painting and sculpting, but the wizarding world didn't have much use for art - magic could supply its place. And, in any case, his girlfriend became pregnant. Peleus needed money, fast, and his eye for detail, his capacity for dreaming, his dedication to the idea of beauty, served him well as a tailor - after all, when people came into his shop, he was creating them afresh. He was sculpting his customers in the image of perfection. He didn't always have the best raw materials to work with, which was why he liked Narcissa Black so much. With her, his work had already been half-done for him. She was the perfect canvas.

Narcissa watched as he unrolled lengths of purple satin, black lace, and plump, sumptuous crimson velvet, for her inspection.

"Too heavy," she murmured, almost to herself.

"Absolutely, madam!" Peleus enthused. "You need cloth as delicate as gossamer to off-set those exquisite features."

Narcissa was used to compliments. They rolled right off her back. She hesitated next to a duck-egg blue sheet of satin; it looked pale and promising, like the first blue sky of Spring.

"I think I will have a dress for the Spring, Peleus," she murmured. "A dress that speaks of new beginnings."

Peleus Buntz was looking at her with his mouth slightly open. Not only did he have a commission that practically amounted to a landscape painting, but blue satin was expensive.

"Madam!" was all he could manage to say.

The bell tinkled again, and Peleus turned to see a man with a pale, pointed face stepping out from under a heavy black cloak. He was gleaming with sweat; Peleus drew the sheet of satin towards him protectively.

"Can I help you, Sir?" he asked, the rapturous note suddenly gone from his voice.

The sweating man seemed to be having trouble articulating himself. Peleus was just considering calling the security troll, when Narcissa spoke. She had been enjoying the man's discomfort immensely, but she had to temper her enjoyment, or she might never feel enjoyment again.

"Why, Mr Malfoy, whatever are you doing here?" she asked, in a voice that was both keen and bored.

Malfoy leapt at the lifeline gratefully. "I saw you come in, and I thought I would take the opportunity to enquire after your family, Miss Black."

"How kind of you," Narcissa replied, still in the same high, artificial voice that indicated her thoughts were elsewhere. "They're all very well, thank you, especially my sister Bellatrix."

Another uncomfortable silence. Narcissa let it spiral into the realms of the unendurable before she broke it.

"Mr Malfoy, may I introduce Peleus Buntz to you? He's the finest tailor in Diagon Alley."

Peleus, on hearing the name Malfoy, had hitched his moustache up into a welcoming smile.

"So sorry that I didn't recognize you, Mr Malfoy. Of course, I see it now from your noble profile. I fitted your father with his burial robes, you know."

For the first time, Lucius Malfoy took his eyes off Narcissa. He gave Peleus Buntz a haughty stare, but Peleus was caught up in the moment and ignored it.

"Yes, such a fine bone-structure! He was so gaunt and impressive at the funeral that several of his students - for you know, Miss Black, he was a highly respected teacher at Hogwarts - came down with fainting spells and nervous twitches! An awe-inspiring man, Miss Black! I only wish I had seen him when he was alive."

"Yes," Malfoy cut in, "we all miss him dreadfully."

This was a slight overstatement. Lucius Malfoy's initial reaction on hearing of his father's death had been to conjure a bottle of Firewhisky and call for a fresh wench. He was, however, a different man now.

"I'm just fitting a dress for the charming Miss Black," said Peleus. "Please take a seat, Mr Malfoy, and I will attend to you as soon as I can."

"Perhaps Mr Malfoy would like to give his opinion on the dress?" Narcissa suggested.

Peleus scowled slightly; he had hoped to be alone with his canvas, but his business instincts prevailed.

"Of course, by all means, only too delighted. What a fortuitous coincidence!"

Peleus lead them into a back room, where an older pair of curtains were losing their battle with the sunlight, which was streaming heedlessly onto the carpet, making the place look garish and untidy.

Narcissa stood on a stool while Peleus Buntz pinned the blue satin around her.

Lucius Malfoy stalked about uncomfortably, alternately clearing his throat and lapsing into a preoccupied silence, in which he forgot to breath, and covered his sudden choking with another round of throat-clearing.

He was staring at Narcissa. She was basking in the sunlight, wincing slightly in its glare - so fresh and delicate; he would not have been surprised to see her beaded and shimmering with dew.

Malfoy stopped mid-pace and stood, blinking stupidly, watching the sunlight filter through her feathery, ice-white hair. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, like a fish struggling on the river-bank, but said nothing.

Narcissa had the good sense to pretend not to notice. She suggested a cowl neck for the dress, and a pair of long white gloves, to which Buntz responded with rapturous noises of approval.

One part of Narcissa's mind was already busy with the spells she could use to accessorize this dress - a subtle Luxus Charm to make her skin glow, a dab of dragon's blood to soften her lips. Dragon's blood felt hot and tingly - it caused the blood to rise to the surface, making lips red, full and sensitive. These agreeable feelings of heat and sensitivity could also be transferred to the lips of anyone that she kissed.

Narcissa was a scientist. She never stopped thinking about cause and effect.

When Peleus went to help her off the stool, he was elbowed in the ribs by Mr Malfoy, who extended his hand to her instead.

Peleus knew enough of Malfoy's father's reputation to believe that he had got off lightly. They were a sadistic family, but their fine bone structure excused them, as far as Peleus was concerned.

"That will be thirty Galleons, madam," he said, with an apologetic cough, as though he was sorry to be talking about something so indelicate to this fragile ice-sculpture of a woman.

"Let me," said Lucius Malfoy, suddenly coming to his senses.

Narcissa acquiesced with a raised eyebrow. She was too ladylike to protest.

"It's nothing to me," Lucius went on, fumbling with a leather pouch of gold Galleons, and dropping a few as he spoke. "I have inherited a vast fortune."

"A fortune is such a vulgar thing to have," Narcissa replied. "Money stinks of muggles, don't you think?"

Malfoy looked stricken. "Then I shall give it all away," he said

She smiled. "Yes. You might do that."

"May I walk you back to the Leaky Cauldron?"

"How did you know I was staying there?" she asked lightly, examining her nails.

Another silence. Severus had not told her that the love potion would diminish Malfoy's intelligence so much. She hoped this wouldn't hinder his political career; the ability to lie swiftly was a necessity for that.

"Very well," she said, "my House Elf is busy at the Apothecary's - I wonder, could you carry these for me?" She pointed to the neatly-wrapped packages and boxes, wrapped in scented tissue paper or tied with gilded ribbon, that comprised her morning's shopping - lapwing feathers, essence of snake-skin, and a new school tie.

They were bowed out of the shop by Peleus Buntz, and walked up the cobble-stoned street, to the sound of birdsong, explosions from the nearby school of Alchemy, and constant throat-clearing from Lucius Malfoy.

He suddenly stopped and turned to her.

"What can I do to make you love me, Narcissa?"

Narcissa was startled by his language - after all, marriage was a business transaction; love was something that came later, or was visited on the side.

"I don't know," she said vaguely, staring in at the window of Eeylops Owl Emporium. It was so dark within that the window was little more than a dark mirror, broken by the occasional bright, amber eye. Narcissa saw her reflection - pale, stunning, pitiless - and it gave her goose-bumps. She controlled herself, however.

"Perhaps if you were Minister For Magic," she suggested lightly.

Lucius was silent for a while. He, too, was looking at her reflection.

"Alright," he said suddenly, "I could do that. But it will take time. And I can't wait -,"

"You mean that you are not accustomed to waiting," Narcissa interrupted. "But you can, and you will, simply because there is nothing else to be done."

Malfoy was silent again. "Then you… you do not care for me?" he said at last.

"I see no reason to, at present."

"But if I could give you a reason… if I could do it… do you promise…?"

Narcissa was still gazing at her dark reflection. She flicked her hair experimentally. Yes, that was perfect.

"I will consider it," she replied.

"There are other women who would beg me for this kind of attention."

Narcissa raised her eyebrows. "You'd better marry one of them, then, hadn't you?"

She turned to leave, but Malfoy caught her arm. "Narcissa - ,"

Narcissa's temper suddenly flared. She was already raw from concealing her exuberance, and now this man had dared to touch her, as though she were just _anybody_, as though she were a rag-doll or a muggle, instead of a daughter of the House of Black.

"My blood-line is pure and ancient, Mr Malfoy," she said. For the first time, there was no trace of boredom in her voice. "I know my own worth. And I'm only taking bids from men with… potential."

She drew her arm out of his grip and took her packages from him. "I wish you joy of your _beggars_, Mr Malfoy," she said icily. "No man could induce me to debase myself like that… unless he were Minister for Magic, of course."

And she walked away, leaving Malfoy to stare miserably after her.

**‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›‹×›**

Lucius went to rejoin Snape in Knockturn Alley. The sunlight streamed down warily here, kept at bay by the black ivy that twisted itself over everything in the cobble-stoned street, and by temporary clouds conjured by businessmen who didn't want their affairs pried into. In fact, as far as Malfoy knew, this was where the phrase 'shady businessmen' had originated.

He found Snape in The Hanged Man, poring over another book on Mind Magic. It wasn't easy to make him look up when he was immersed in these volumes, so Malfoy kicked over a chair, and threw his cane at the barman, who was not very alert at the best of times, and barely seemed to realise that he had been hit with it.

"Something wrong?" Snape asked quietly.

"I have to become Minister for Magic," Lucius answered shortly.

Snape absorbed this information with the same easy acceptance with which he faced everything these days. Aside from the question of whether or not he was going to kill Potter, nothing really mattered. And it never occurred to him to question anything Lucius Malfoy said. He was a pure-blood wizard, and a Death Eater. He knew what he was talking about.

"Well, it's not impossible," he said fairly. "You've got a better chance than most wizards your age."

Lucius sat down heavily. The barman wandered over and offered him his cane, but Malfoy ignored him, so he dropped the cane beside their table and wondered off, shaking violently, as always.

"Narcissa won't marry me unless I become Minister for Magic," Malfoy explained sullenly, resting his chin on his upturned palm and staring out of the window.

"Oh," said Severus.

"And there's no other woman like her."

Severus, who could sense another speech on Narcissa's various perfections coming, lowered his eyes to his book again. He was just starting a chapter on Legilimency - there was a section on giving your victims horrible nightmares by planting unsettling images in their minds - and, as usual, he was fantasising about using this on James Potter.

"All the other women I've been with," Malfoy went on, "all they wanted was prestige. The honour of being with a Malfoy. They were using me."

Severus smiled thinly, but did not look up from his book. "My heart bleeds for you," he said.

"It is not pleasant to be used, Severus," Malfoy said, a shade reproachfully.

"I'm not saying it is. I'm just saying that, if I was going to be used, that's how I'd like it to happen."

Malfoy hardly seemed to hear him. "They just wanted to please me. How base, how _servile_ they were."

Severus thought of saying that he couldn't imagine Bellatrix Black acting servile, but the truth was, he could, and he didn't want to, so he changed the subject.

"You said in your letter that you were ill."

In truth, Severus had arrived at The Hanged Man in a state of bitter, but rigidly-controlled, despair. He had expected to be accused of lacing Malfoy's Butterbeer with Amortentia – half of him had even _wanted_ to be accused of lacing Malfoy's Butterbeer with Amortentia. He wanted to _fight_ somebody. He was sick of events just rolling over him in their contemptuous, indifferent way.

He had been so certain that the episode with the Dark Snitch would make him feel better – not fix things, of course, because Lily was still lost to him, and Potter would always be an idiot, no matter how many times he tried to saw his own arm off. But he had expected... _something_. Some kind of easing of the tension that had been building up in his chest since last summer, when he'd been dangled upside-down in front of the whole school, and goaded into calling Lily a mudblood. He had expected to feel some measure of control over his own life again, but the injustice of Dumbledore's reaction – the injustice of the entire _school's_ reaction – the way Potter was now being visited by a handful of adoring girls who seemed to be driven wild by the sight of a scar – had shaken him to the core.

He had made terrible resolutions, and he was afraid of backing them up. He knew now that he had to give up on finding justice by legitimate means. He had to join the Death Eaters as soon as possible – as soon as they'd have him – but he was afraid of the finality of that act. So he had settled into a state of reckless, seething despair, skulking in corners, snapping at everyone who dared to approach him, and looking at Lily with a kind of hungry contempt, wondering each time whether he would ever see her again.

"I _am_ ill!" Malfoy shouted, making the Bartender jump. "Do I _look_ healthy? Narcissa says I have to be Minister for Magic before she'll even look at me, and every second when she _doesn't_ look at me is excruciating! How am I going to get through an election campaign when I'm dying by inches every second? What would _you_ do, Severus?"

Snape stared at him, astonished. Pure-bloods didn't often ask for his opinion. They assumed that someone whose opinion was worth valuing would have bothered to wash his hair. Besides, it was a widely-held belief that proximity to muggles sapped your intelligence. Severus had spent his entire childhood surrounded by them – although, in his defence, he had tried to hide himself away as much as possible.

But now, Malfoy was hungrily awaiting his reply, as though he was a prophet of common-sense. And he'd barely had the Amortentia in his system for three days! What was going to happen after a week – a _month_ – of this sentimental poisoning?

"She'll see reason," Snape said slowly. "She's a Slytherin."

Lucius grunted. He was absent-mindedly playing with a thin strip of blue satin in his hands. He had stolen it from Peleus Buntz's shop; it was one of the off-cuts of Narcissa's new dress.

"Is there anyone she likes at Hogwarts?" he murmured.

"Your closest rival is her mirror."

Malfoy bristled, but didn't say anything. In spite of Snape's disrespectful tone, he knew that he was telling the truth, simply because he had no other option. There was a charm placed upon trainee Death Eaters: if you lied to another Death Eater, your nose would start to bleed. If you didn't immediately respond with the truth, the bleeding wouldn't stop. No amount of healing magic could help you. Only the truth would prevent you from bleeding to death. Snape was under this charm, and he knew it; he couldn't lie to Lucius Malfoy.

However, concealment was Snape's primary occupation. It had started out as a necessity and turned into a hobby. He liked to seem mysterious, to his friends as well as his enemies - he thought that people were more likely to fear him if they didn't understand him.

He had devoted a large portion of his considerable intellect towards planning for just such an eventuality as this. The Charm placed upon trainee Death Eaters had the same loop-hole as Veritaserum: you had to tell the truth, but you didn't have to tell the _whole_ truth. If they didn't ask, there was no need to tell.

"Do you think Narcissa has the ability to mix up a love potion this strong?" Malfoy asked suddenly.

Snape told him honestly that he didn't.

"But someone could have done it for her?"

"Yes," Snape said carefully.

"Who would she trust to help her with something like that?"

"Nobody," Severus replied, again with perfect honesty. Narcissa didn't _trust_ people; she manipulated them. But he was starting to feel anxious now - he'd come close to lying - and, when Lucius looked away, he gave a cautious sniff. Was he just imagining it, or was his nose starting to run? He made an artless attempt to change the subject.

"Did you know that you don't need a wand to practise mind magic?" he asked.

Lucius made a non-committal noise and continued to stare out of the window.

Severus was beginning to understand that he had been practising Occlumency since he was four years-old. Whenever his parents argued, he would lie back on his bed and stare at his bedroom ceiling; it was always striped with the gritty amber light of the street-lamps filtering through the blinds; and, while shouts and thuds shook the floor beneath him, Severus would concentrate on those bars of light and hypnotise himself into a state of calm, sneering indifference. Nothing could touch him in that state.

But all magic exacts a toll, just as every potion has a side-effect: you couldn't work magic without giving a part of yourself in return.

The unfortunate side-effect of Snape's emotional subterfuge was that it resulted in emotional pyrotechnics: sudden outbursts of anger, or passion, or grief, that could, at times, knock him unconscious.

Lucius sighed. "No, perhaps she doesn't trust anyone. But she's going to start trusting _you_, Severus. You must be my eyes and ears at Hogwarts. You must find out if she's poisoning me. And keep men away from her, whether she's poisoning me or not."

Malfoy examined the tattered piece of satin in his hand. "All she cares about is having a powerful husband," he murmured sullenly.

"Very wise," Severus replied.

"It's as though marrying is her job."

Severus smiled. "'Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content. Narcissa's occupation's back.'"

Malfoy glanced sideways at his companion. He'd noticed that Severus was getting more and more flippant these days.

"How are things at home, Severus?" he asked pointedly.

Snape looked up. His usual answer, 'fine', would cause him to bleed to death.

"No different," he said, after a while, and then turned back to his book in resentful silence.

Malfoy smirked; he felt as though he had scored a moral victory. You had to keep these people in their place.


End file.
